V^-V V*^s** %*^-f-y^ V- 



^^..c,^^ 









0^ < 







>*^ .<■•• 






'%'-V\ 



^''^'h.. . 






<p^ '•.•' ^v %t. 



';^ 0*' 



**^% 




















>* *•-«* *-?> 



' \'^'U'" V'^y v?^-'*/ \ 












^*^ «' - - « *> AT 



(^UH 




Engraved from a i)ortrait in the London Illustrated News. 



CHi^RLES GEORGE GORDON 



A Nineteenth Century Worthy 



OF THE 



ENGLISH CHURCH. 



THEODORE M. RILEY, S. T. D., 

Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Nashotah House; Honorary 
Canon op All Saints' Cathedral, Milwaukee, Wis. 



The Saints shine like a river of stars, 
Athwart the Church's firmament.'"— Farrar. 



MILWAUKEE: 
THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN COMPANY. 

1888. 






KING, rOWLE At KATZ, PRINTERS, 
MILWAUKEE. 



TO 

THE RIGHT REVEREND 

EDWARD RANDOLPH WELLES, S. T. D, 

BISHOP OF MILWAUKEE, 

PRINTED AT HIS SUGGESTION, 

IS 

WITH MOST FILIAL LOVE AND RESPECT 

DEDICATED. 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

I. An Uncanonized Saint of the Church of 

England, - - - - 13 

II. Education and Reading, - - - 21 

III. Military Career ; China, - - - 29 

IV. Life at Gravesend, - - - - 39 
Y. Galatz and Central Africa, - - 53 

yi. India, Ireland, Mauritius, Palestine; Re- 
turn TO THE Soudan, - - - 63 

yil. The End, 73 

VIII. Person and Manners, - - - 81 

IX. Devotional Habits, - - - - 95 

X. Cast of Mind and Fundamental Religious 

Ideas, ------ 103 

XI. Conclusion, - - - - - 121 

APPENDIX. 

Gordon's Prayer (A), - - - - - 129 

Motto (B), 131 

Maxims (C), ----- 133 



PREFACE 



TTHIS little contribution to General Gordon's precious 
memory was not prepared for publication. It was 
drawn up to be read before a Parochial Guild. It so 
happened that it was, however, in the first place read 
before the Clericas of Milwaukee. It met with so 
kindly a reception and with so unexpected a request 
for publication, that notwithstanding its brevity, and 
from that fact, if from no other, its unsatisfactorinees 
as a complete portraiture of its great subject, it is gladly 
given for whatever uses it may serve. It is a very 
unpretending attempt at a portraiture of the man: 
nothing else. The military and political career of 
General Gordon has been, in the compiler's mind, quite 
secondary to his extraordinary character, which was 
knightly, heroic and saintly. It may be said respect- 
ing his saintliness, as Dr. Mahan has said of that of 
S. Cyprian, another African Saint and Martyr: "His 
saintliness was of no artificial or conventional type. It 
was the consecration of a firm will, manly instincts, 
magnanimous disposition, and of a mind politic and 
sagacious, as it was earnest and intrepid." There were, 



Vlll PREFACE. 

indeed, features of Gordon's character and life which 
assimilate him to the great family of the Canonized 
Saints, and betray a share of their specific quality. 
But he was, nevertheless, a new and unique manifesta- 
tion of divine grace and power: as, indeed, all great 
Saints have been. Canon Paget has said: " It is the 
privilege of saintliness to surprise us with a fresh illus- 
tration of primary graces." This is Gordon's great 
charm, and his especial value. He illustrates a new 
form of the divine life, suited to our day, and to the 
circumstances of its busy, hot and hurried peculiari- 
ties. 

One cannot but feel how imperfect any mere sketch 
is of so unique and many-sided a man. To know him 
thoroughly, one must read all that has been written 
about him. The writer of this memoir has availed him- 
self of both thought and language of several of Gor- 
don's biographers. He has taken both briefly and at 
large from their very words, in order that the story may 
be as well told as possible within the limitations deter- 
mined upon for this sketch. The authorities quoted 
are, in the main: "The Story of Chinese Gordon," by 
A. Egmont Hake; " Three Martyrs of the Nineteenth 
Century," by the author of " Chronicles of the Schon- 
berg-Cotta Family;" "General Gordon, the Christian 
Hero," by the author of " New World Heroes;" " Charles 
George Gordon: A Sketch," by Reginald H. Barnes, 



PREFACE. IX 

Vicar of Heavitree, and Charles E. Brown, Major R. A.; 
and " Reflections in Palestine, 1883," by Charles George 
Gordon. Much valuable information has been derived 
from an article entitled "Gordon at Gravesend: a Per- 
sonal Reminiscence," by Arthur Stannard, and pub- 
lished in the April number of the Nineteenth Century^ 
1885; also from an article in the Fortnightly Review, 
of July, 1884, by W. H. Mallock, and entitled, "A Mes- 
sage from General Gordon. Edited from unpublished 
papers." 

Dr. Birbeck Hill's " Colonel Gordon in Central 
Africa;" Gordon's "Journals at Khartoum," and Sir 
Henry Gordon's " Events in the Life of Charles George 
Gordon," will also be found full of valuable matter. 

It is greatly to be hoped that eventually a thorough 
and complete life of Gordon will be given to the world, 
which shall contain a history of the beginning, no less 
than of the aftergrowth of his religious career. So 
great a soul as he is a gift of God to the world: and 
any detail of so great a life of grace as his, will not be 
without value and consequence. 

Gordon's Prayer and his Motto have been given as 
an Appendix, together with some of his less well-known 
maxims and sayings. The Prayer will not be without 
its helpfulness to many souls, full though it be of the 
seemingly exaggerated humility and self-accusation of 
the Saints. The Motto will be felt to be very charac- 
teristic. 



X PREFACE. 

This little sketch is now gratefully sent on its way 
to do what little service it may be called to. The 
knowledge of the life of this great soul, fitly termed by 
the Arabs themselves the "magnanimous," has been 
and is not only an "education," but an inspiration. 
May it stimulate many perceiving and receptive souls 
to lives of generous emulation of Gordon's chivalrous 
and manly devotion to God and men. 

The writer desires to express his thanks to Oliver 
Matson, B. A., of Nashotah House, for assisting in the 
preparation of this manuscript for the press. 

T. M. R. 

Nashotah House, 26 January, 1888. 

Dies Natalis C. G. G. 



J^u ®ucatt0ut^cd ^aiiit of tixe ©Ixxtvclx 
jof gttolaud* 



CpLES GEORGE GORDON; 

A Nineteenth Century Worthy of the 
English Church. 



I. 



AN UNCANONIZED SAINT OF THE CHURCH OF 
ENGLAND. 

T T is said that whenever men come into the 
presence of the Apollo Belvedere, they are 
observed to straighten themselves up to their 
best and highest proportions. A life of beauty 
and grandeur has a similar influence upon 
men. Its contemplation compels to admira- 
tion and emulation. For this reason it is that 
the world celebrates its heroes, and the Church 
her Saints. Great men in every department 
of life are worthy of remembrance ; great 
Saints are worthy of the canonization they 

13 



14 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

receive, whether it be formal or informal. The 
higher the t3n3e of man, the higher the quali- 
ties he represents, the higher the aims and 
ends his life is devoted to, the more lofty should 
be the altitude to which his memory is ele- 
vated. 

The subject of this paper was one of earth's 
great men, and at the same time one of the 
Church's Saints. " Saint " and '' Hero '' the late 
Bishop Wordsworth, of Lincoln^ called him; 
while a distinguished author has lately re- 
marked of him: " It is not one of the 'little 
hills,' it is one of the ' mountains of God ' that 
has been close to us." Had he lived in the times 
of the Crusades he would doubtless ere this 
have been canonized; had he lived or died in 
the Greek or Latin Communions in our own 
day, he sooner or later would have been enrolled 
among the beatified souls whom the Church 
delights to honour. As things are, he lived 
and died in the Church of England, which un- 
happily, in my judgment, has ceased to canon- 
ize her great children, except so far as the 
popular mind confers that honour. Canoniza- 
tion in its true idea is simply enrollment on the 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 15 

list of eminently holy souls whom the Church 
has deemed fit to be set forth as examples to 
their fellow men. In the early Church popu- 
lar veneration first assigned a place among 
the Saints to persons of transcendent and 
heroic piety ; then the Bishop of the Diocese 
performed in time the act of enrollment or 
canonization, sanctioning with the supreme 
authority of the Diocese the fiat of the popu- 
lar heart. All Bishops originally possessed this 
right of canonization. In the time of Alex- 
ander III., local canonizations were forbidden^ 
and thereafter Rome kept in the hands of the 
Supreme Pontiff a privilege and power which 
should never have thus been limited or re- 
served. Si,nce Alexander's time the Church of 
England has conducted no processes of canoni- 
zation. She has, indeed, given in her Prayer 
Book the title of beatification (the second stage 
of canonization) to Charles, the Royal Martyr, 
but to no one else. The powers of her Bishops 
have remained latent and unused in this re- 
spect. She has raised up most holy souls wor- 
thy, indeed, of canonization, but she has kept 
silent respecting their virtues, except so far as 



16 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

private biographers, individual preachers or 
the popular instinct have accorded the title of 
Saint or Martyr to this or that person. The 
term " Worthy " is the highest designation she 
has in her popular vocabulary for her heroes 
and beatified souls. It is a sad pity that this 
is so. It is made a reproach sometimes that 
the Church of England has no post-Reforma- 
tion Saints, and that she seems to care little 
for sanctity in its heroic forms; so little, in- 
deed, as to have excluded its formal recogni- 
tion from her public acts. Yet she has never 
been wanting in Saints as a matter of fact, 
whether sanctity be defined as "the confluence 
of all the Christian virtues in one and the same 
soul," or as " the love of God and of men car- 
ried to a sublime extravagance." One has only 
to recall the names of Nicholas Ferrar (a true 
Saint of the old ascetic type). Bishop Andrewes, 
Bishop Ken, Bishop Wilson, Mrs. Godolphin, 
and others of a similar type, to realize how 
true this is. One need not speak of the Royal 
Martyr, nor of Archbishop Laud, nor of the 
Martyrs of modern times, McKenzie and Pat- 
teson and Hannington; nor of Louis Schuyler 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 17 

and his fellow Priests at Memphis who, on our 
own soil, with Sister Constance and her com- 
panions, gave up their lives to God amid the 
fires of pestilence; nor need one speak of Jer- 
emy Taylor, of Bishop Sanderson, of Arch- 
bishop Leighton, of Pusey, and JSTeale, and 
Keble; nor of our own DeKoven; nor of Breck, 
of Nashotah. The popular heart has enrolled 
all these, in their several places, in the Sacred 
Catalogue. Untitled, unbeatified, and uncanon- 
ized by authority, they yet live in the thought 
and feeling and devotion of all good Anglicans, 
and are each an inspiration and a help to their 
brethren still struggling in the v/orld. 

Among all the Saints and Heroes of An- 
glican Christianity, the subject of this paper, 
Charles George Gordon, has no subordinate 
place. Whether we consider his spirit, his 
aims, his prayers, his alms-giving, his corporal 
and spiritual works of mercy, his austerities, 
his detachment, his unselfishness, his purity, 
his supreme devotion to the will of God ; to the 
Blessed Sacrament ; to the Holy Spirit ; — his 
mental and bodily sufferings, or his cruel death: 
he is wanting in no one trait which goes to 



18 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

make up the Saint. And so I venture to speak 
of him, not chiefly on the military or worldly 
side of his career, but as a nineteenth century 
Worthy of our own Anglican Communion. 



II. 

gdttcatioii autli^caditts, 



11. 

EDUCATION AND READING. 

/^UR Saint was born at Woolwich on the 28th 
^^^ of January, 1833. His father was Lieu- 
tenant-General Henry William Gordon, of the 
Royal Artillery, a descendant of the "Gay Gor- 
dons" of Scotland, and a soldier, it is said, " of 
the highest type, honourable, kindly, just, and 
devoted to his profession,'' which had been that 
of his father, grandfather and ancestors gener- 
ally. The mother of the "Good Pasha" was 
an Enderby, the daughter of a great merchant 
and explorer, from whom a strip of country in 
the Antarctic Ocean is known by the name of 
"Enderby's Lands." It is a curious fact of 
interest to Americans, that Samuel Enderby, 
fathei- of Mrs. Gordon and grandfather of our 
subject, was the owner of the two vessels char- 
tered by the English Government to carry the 
tea to Boston Harbour which became the occa- 



22 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

"^sion of the American Revolution. It is said of 
Gordon's mother, that she was a woman of re- 
markable character. '' She possessed a perfect 
temper; she was always cheerful under the 
most trying circumstances, and she was always 
thoughtful of others; she contended with diffi- 
culties without the slightest display of effort; 
and she had a genius for making the best of 
everything." 

As a boy, Gordon is said to have had much 
energy, but not very great physical strength. 
He had naturally a quick and generous temper, 
with some fire. A characteristic story is told 
of an occurrence during his cadetship at Wool- 
wich (which he entered upon after a time spent 
at Taunton, in Somersetshire). '' ' You are in- 
competent; you will never make an officer,' 
said his superior in rebuke to him one day; 
and with flashing eyes and flushed cheeks the 
lad tore from his shoulders the epaulettes that 
he wore and cast them down before his re- 
prover's ' feet." Gordon's education w^as, of 
course, that of the military academy chiefly, 
and I take it that the English curriculum 
is substantially that of our own West Point. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 23 

This, of course, would secure training in 
all English branches, notably in mathemat- 
ics and international law; it would secure in- 
struction in French and Spanish, at least; be- 
sides various accomplishments, such as riding, 
drawing, etc. (General Gordon's Journals show 
him to have been an accomplished draughts- 
man.) Gordon, however, as time went on, 
widened and deepened his reading. He had a 
most cordial admiration for the old ethical 
writers. Epictetus he knew intimately. " The 
Thoughts" of Marcus Aurelius were a sort of 
vade mecum with him, as was the " Imitation of 
Christ." He was in the habit of giving copies 
of these to his friends as mementoes, especially 
the "Imitation." His friend, Mr. Barnes, of 
Heavitree, says of him: ''He may not have 
read a very large number of books — the circum- 
stances of his life made it almost impossible 
that he should have done so — but those which 
he attempted to master, he mastered thorough- 
ly, and they were, by no means, all of one 
kind. Of the devotional books which he knew 
almost by heart, the English Book of Common 
Prayer and the 'Imitation of Christ' (Hutch- 



24 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

ing's translation), may stand as specimens. 
He made constant use, too, of 'Daily Prayer,' 
by Dumbleton, and of Dr. Samuel Clarke's 
'Scripture Promises.'" "Among books of a 
different class, well known to him in 1883, 
or before that year, were the works of Jose- 
phus, Bishop Pearson on the Creed and 
Bishop Harold Browne on the Thirty-nine Ar- 
ticles, of which latter treatise he wrote ex- 
pressly that it was of much use to him. The 
works of Bishop Wordsworth, of Lincoln, were 
familiar to him, and he had acquired a con- 
siderable amount of knowledge of Patristic 
Literature." He seems to have known some- 
thing of Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. He recom- 
mended " Plutarch's Lives '* for the reading of 
young officers. He seems to have known well 
Cardinal Newman's "Dream of Grerontius," and 
I have somewhere seen in some sentence of his 
a reference to Dickens. It is to be presumed, 
therefore, that as time and duties j)ermitted he 
allowed himself an acquaintance with all good 
literature. Gordon's practical education in 
the book of man — of humanity — was very gre^t, 
from his having had a large acquaintance with 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 25 

English, Scotch, Irish, French, Swiss, Chinese, 
Armenians, Arabs, Russians, Americans, Egyp- 
tians, Jews and Africans. His knowledge of 
classes was as extensive as that of races. He 
knew the courts of Kings ; Leopold, of Bel- 
gium, was his fast friend. He himself was a 
Viceroy, a Pasha of Egypt, a Chinese noble of 
highest rank, a Major-General in Her Majesty's 
service, a Companion of the Bath, and a Knight 
of the Legion of Honour ; he was the intimate 
friend of Priests, Soldiers, Bishops; a visitor of 
hospitals and bedridden invalids; and a bene- 
factor and teacher of Gravesend boys. With 
all these, Sovereigns, Princes, Cabinet Ofiicers, 
Generals, Ambassadors, Royal Commissioners, 
Sheiks, Mudirs, Bishops, Priests, Sailors, Sol- 
diers, good Women, Boys, as his environment, 
what else needed he to complete his social ex- 
perience, and to deepen and enlarge the man ? 



III. 



III. 



MILITARY CAREER IN CHINA. 

/^"^ ORDON'S career was as varied as his ex- 
perience of men. In December, 1854, he 
joined the army as Lieutenant of Engineers in 
the Crimea. In May, 1856, he was ordered to 
help in laying down the new frontiers of Russia, 
Turkey and Roumania. Resting afterward for 
six months in England, he was sent to Armenia 
on a delimitation commission, to arrange the 
boundaries of Russia and Turkey, in Asia. 
Then he spent a year as Instructor of Field 
Works and as Adjutant at Chatham, and in 
July, 1860, as Captain Gordon, and at twenty- 
seven years of age, he left home for service in 
China. There he remained until November, 
1864. It was not until January, 1863, that he 
was called to the great work which gave him 
the name of "Chinese Gordon." In January 
of that year, the English Government was 

29 



30 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

requested by the Imperial Government of China 
to give them an English officer to command 
the Europeans who were engaged in putting 
down the Tai-Ping Rebellion. The choice fell 
on Gordon, and in two years he put down 
an insurrection which had distracted and 
desolated China for more than twenty years. 
The head of the Rebellion was known as the 
Celestial King. He first rallied twenty thou- 
sand of his clansmen around him, making 
his kinsmen " Wangs," or subordinate kings. 
Then, on the pretence of avenging the wrongs 
of his race, he advanced, plundering the towns 
and villages on his way, "joining to himself 
pirates from the coast, and robbers from the 
hills, until the Rebel army rose to hundreds 
of thousands, and with these, armed with any 
weapons available, he laid waste the country, 
until he had reached Nanking, where he estab- 
lished his court." 

'^The misery of the country under the devas- 
tations of these fierce, piratical hordes was 
frightful; ruin, starvation and cannibalism fol- 
lowed in their steps." It was to put down this 
Rebellion that Gordon was summoned when he 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 31 

was not yet thirty years old. "It was a ques- 
tion of order as against chaos." His first work 
was to create "a disciplined army out of a 
troop of adventurers gathered from all coun- 
tries," and then with it to suppress the Rebel- 
lion. This suppression was accomplished by 
his "strong hand and delicate touch." 

The details of this struggle I shall not go into, 
as they are not within the special purpose of 
this sketch. I shall only mention a few inci- 
dents connected with it. First, he never went 
into battle armed; his only weapon was a cane 
or a wand. Thus, it has been pointed out, he 
followed unconsciously in the steps of another 
great instrument of God, Joan of Arc, who 
went into battle without sword, carrying only 
her banner of the fleur-de-lis. Gordon seems 
to have been absolutely fearless of possibilities, 
and, indeed, confident with a conviction of 
safety. This sense of immunity seems never 
to have left him until he departed from Eng- 
land for the last time. He seems to have fore- 
known that he should die at Khartoum, and 
made all his arrangements for it. But in the 
Crimea and in China it was otherwise. He 



32 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

seemed confident of safety in some strange 
way. 

During his Chinese experience, Gordon man- 
ifested that righteous severity which was by 
no means left out of his composition, gentle 
and tender and kind as in fitting time it was. 
There was enough of the spirit of the Hebrew 
prophet in him to strike when the cause of jus- 
tice demanded it. On a certain occasion^ the 
artillery having refused to fall in, and having 
threatened to shoot their officers, Gordon called 
the non-commissioned officers together and 
demanded of them the name of the ringleader 
of the mutiny. On his demand being refused, 
he told them with quiet determination that 
one in every five should then be shot, an an- 
nouncement received with groans. Gordon 
then advanced to the ranks, dragged out with 
his own hand the man who was making the 
greatest disturbance, and had him shot by 
some infantry who were standing by. On an- 
other occasion he secured obedience in an 
equally vigorous fashion, until within less than 
a week from the beginning of the mutiny the 
spirit of the troops was as excellent as before. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 33 

In return for his splendid services to China, 
Gordon would only accept the distinction of 
the two orders of nobility which in China cor- 
respond to those of the Garter and Bath in 
England; and these honours he received, not 
because he in the least valued them himself, 
but, as he wrote to his mother, '' because you 
and my father like them." '' The Chinese Gov- 
ernment twice offered him a fortune. On the 
first occasion ten thousand taels were actually 
brought into his room. He drove out the bear- 
ers of the treasure, and would not even look at 
it." "On the second occasion the sum was still 
larger, but this also he declined, and after- 
wards wrote home: 'I do not want anything, 
either money or honours, from either the Chi- 
nese Government or our own. As for the hon- 
ours, I do not value them at all; I know I shall 
leave China as poor as I entered it, but with 
the knowledge that through my weak instru- 
mentality upwards of eighty thousand to one 
hundred thousand lives have been spared.' " 
Mr. Egmont Hake, in his '^ Story of Chinese 
Gordon," assures us that our hero not only 
refused two fortunes, but that he spent his pay 



34 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

of twelve hundred pounds a year in comforts 
for his army and in the relief of the victims of 
the insurgent troops ; and that for these pur- 
poses he even taxed his private means. 

The Times summed up the work of Gordon 
in China in these words : " He found the rich- 
est and most fertile districts of China in the 
hands of savage brigands. The silk districts 
were the scenes of their cruelty and riot, and 
the great historical cities Hangchow and Soo- 
ohow were rapidly following the fate of Nan- 
king, and were becoming desolate ruins. Gor- 
don cut the rebellion in half, recovered the 
great cities, and utterly discouraged the frag- 
ments of the brigand power. All this he 
effected, first, by the power of his arms, and 
afterward, still more rapidly, by the terror of 
his name." 

Prince Kung wrote to Sir Frederick Bruce, 
the English Ambassador, that as Gordon had re- 
fused the rewards the Chinese Government de- 
sired to offer him, they now requested the gov- 
ernment of Her Majesty, the English Queen, to 
give him some reward for which he would 
really care. In consequence of this request. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 35 

Gordon was made a Companion of the Order of 
the Bath — a rare distinction, it is said, to be 
given for service under a foreign power. He 
was also entrusted with the defenses of the 
Thames at Gravesend, the central point of the 
Empire. 

It may be here mentioned that fifteen years 
after Gordon's repression of the Chinese Rebel- 
lion, the Chinese Government again invoked 
his mediation in a critical moment, when war 
seemed about to break out between Russia and 
China. Gordon went once more to China and 
succeeded in maintaining peace. And thus 
having, as one has said, '' simply by the weight 
of his presence and character reconciled two 
great empires, he returned * "^ "^ to whatever 
little place his country would give him in her 
service, or in the service of mankind, any- 
where ;" '' refusing to be treated as a hero," 
" seeking to be forgotten," and so succeeding 
that he soon ceased to be talked about. 



IV. 
%iU at CSKawesctixV. 



IV. 



LIFE AT GRAVESEND. 



\ 1 T'E now come to a period of Gordon's life 
more full of interest, perhaps, than any 
other before or after — more full, that is, of 
moral interest — viz., his six years' retreat, as it 
were, at Gravesend. As one of his biographers 
has remarked, " he had shown how, on strange 
battle-fields, and on high levels, visible to the 
whole world, the simplest Christian duty means 
the loftiest heroism. Now he was to show how 
the most burning enthusiasm, and the highest 
heroic quality, can find an adequate battle-field 
in doing on low levels, and in quiet places, the 
simplest duties open to all, and fighting the 
common miseries and sins around and within 
us all." "Those six years," Mr. Egmont Hake 
writes, '' different from any other period of his 
career, were perhaps among the happiest of his 
life. To the world his life at Gravesend was a 



39 



40 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

life of self-suppression and self-denial ; to him- 
self it was one of happiness and true peace. 
He lived wholly for others. His house was 
school, and hospital, and alms-house in turn ; 
was more like the abode of a missionary than 
of a Colonel of Engineers. The troubles of all 
interested him alike ; the poor, the sick, the 
unfortunate, were ever welcome; and never did 
suppliant knock vainly at his door. He always 
took great delight in children, but especially in 
boys employed on the river, or sea. Many he 
rescued from the gutter, cleansed them and 
clothed them, and kept them for weeks in his 
house. For their benefit he established even- 
ing classes, over which he himself presided, 
reading to, and teaching the lads, with as much 
ardour as if he were leading them to victory. 
He called them his ''kings,'" and for many of 
them he got berths on board ship. In their 
voyages he prayed day by day for them as they 
went. His classes at last became so full that the 
house could not hold them, and so had to be 
given up." Then it was that he attended and 
taught at the Ragged schools, where it was 
pleasant, as his biographer has remarked, to 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 41 

watch the attention with which his wild schol- 
ars listened to his words. The Work-house and 
the Infirmary were his constant haunts. He 
began his working day at 8 in the morning and 
ended it at 2. '' Before and after those hours," 
one of his friends has said, '^ he was as inaccess- 
ible as if he had been on the other side of the 
globe." His early hours were doubtless given 
to God, and his afternoons to the sick and 
poor. Two afternoons in the week he went to 
the Infirmary; other afternoons were given to 
old and bedridden people living outside the 
town and in the country districts, who had few 
to look after them. '' To these old people he 
was more genial and communicative than to 
any one else, and would tell them long stories 
of his doings in Russia and in China, which it 
was simply impossible for any well-to-do per- 
son to extract from him." Among these he 
had countless pensioners^ even up to the time 
of his death. His own life was simple and 
austere to the point of asceticism. His house 
was large^ but his bed-room contained only 
a bed, a chair, and a box. He made the bed- 
chambers of the poor and sick, however, radiant 



42 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

with exquisite flowers and fruits. His grounds 
were large, and these he apportioned to a num- 
ber of poor people for little vegetable gardens. 
His own food was simple, to the point of dis- 
tastefulness ; all eating and drinking he seems 
to have been indifferent to. One of his friends 
writes, that going to his house, in Gravesend, 
one afternoon late, Gordon's tea was found 
waiting for him. It was a most unappetizing 
stale loaf and a pot of tea. His friend re- 
marked upon the dryness of the bread, where- 
upon Gordon took the whole loaf (a small one), 
crammed it into the slop basin, and poured all 
the tea in upon it, saying that it would soon 
be ready for him to eat, and that in a half an 
hour it would not matter what he had eaten. 
Notwithstanding his austere and saintly 
simplicity, as evinced by details of this kind, 
Gordon was utterly free from cant. He never 
sought to press religion indiscriminately upon 
the notice of those with whom he came in 
contact ; he confined himself in that way very 
much to those who were sick, to boys, and to 
old people. He was, however, as his friend 
Stannard writes, aa assiduous tract distributer 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 48 

in a quiet way. ''Any one who next trod the 
same path which the Colonel had walked, 
from one fort to another, as he sometimes did, 
would generally find a sprinkling of tracts on 
the way, all so placed that they could not be 
mistaken for stray paper deposited by wind or 
chance; If there was a stile to get over, a 
tract would be on the top bar, kept in place by 
a heavy stone ; if the footpath were narrow, 
another tract would be found in the middle of 
it, secured in the same way ; others would be 
seen hung on any nails that might project from 
the fence or the wall, or wrapped around gate- 
handles or bars — all so ingeniously^ placed that 
no one could fail to see that they had been put 
there purposely. At one fort a powerful tele- 
scope was kept, through which the actions of 
those at the next fort, a mile and a half dis- 
tant, could be watched:" and this was very 
frequently used, Stannard says, to count up 
the tracts he disposed of on the way. "All the 
world knows now," Stannard goes on to ob- 
serve, '' how powerfully Gordon was swayed by 
his religious feelings. Nothing has been writ- 
ten on that head which exceeds the truth." 



44 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

''When one realized what he did day by day, 
and all with such absolute indifference to 
praise or blame, one could not fail to compre- 
hend that Gordon did live for his God and not 
for himself. All he did was done without a 
thought of man's approbation or regard : he 
spared himself no exertion that could add to 
the comfort of those who were sick or miser- 
able ; his purse was never well stocked, for his 
gifts were onlj'' limited by his means. When 
he left Gravesend for Galatz in 1871, he made 
arrangements to have the old and disabled 
persons, whom he regularly relieved up till 
then, still provided with regular pensions at 
his expense, in amounts varying from one to 
ten shillings a week ; and even at the time of 
his death some of these were living and bene- 
fitting from his purse." "When we heard of 
his appointment '' at Galatz, "we were one and 
all distressed, * ■'' * for we felt * ^^ * 
that we were not likely to see again a man 
whose whole life was such a lesson in modesty, 
energy, capacity and godliness. I think it was 
not until he was really gone that we fully realized 
how great a man had passed from our midst." 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 45 

Another, writing of him in these days, says: 
" We used to say he had no self, in that, follow- 
ing his Divine Master, he never would talk of 
himself and his doings. Therefore, his life 
never can and never will be written. * ^ -^ 
He used to say, 'No man has a right to he 
proud of anything, inasmuch as he has no na- 
tive good in him; he has received it all;* and 
he maintained there was deep cause of humilia- 
tion on the part of every one; that all wear- 
ing of medals, adorning of the body, or any 
form of self-glorification was quite out of 
place. Also, he said, he had no right to pos- 
sess anything, having once given himself to 
God. What was he to keep back ? He knew 
no limit. He said to me, 'You, who profess 
the same, have no right to the gold chain you 
wear. It ought to be sold for the poor.' But 
he acknowledged the difficulty of others re- 
garding all earthly things in the same light as 
he did. He told us that the silver tea service 
that he kept (a present from Sir William Gor- 
don) would be sufficient to pay for his burial, 
without troubling his family. But though he 
would never speak of his own acts, he would 



46 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

talk freely of his thoughts, and long and in- 
tensely interesting conversations we had with 
him. His mystical turn of mind lent a great 
charm to his words, and we learned a great 
deal from him. I have often wished I had re- 
corded at the time many of his aphorisms. We 
saw him very frequentl5^ but there was a tacit 
understanding that we never were to invite 
him nor ask him to stay longer when he rose 
to go. To ask him to dinner would have been 
a great offense. He would say, 'Ask the poor 
and sick; don't ask me who have enough !' " 

As an illustration of his self-denial and in- 
difference to human respect, I must relate an 
incident associated with this period of his life, 
which strikingly reminds one of S. Martin, of 
Tours, just as his indifference to pleasant food 
reminds one of S. Chrysostom, and, indeed, of 
all the Saints. The story is, that on a cold, 
bleak, drizzling day, Gordon found on the dock 
at Gravesend an old sailor, who stood waiting, 
without a coat (which, it seems, he had pawned 
for grog) for the vessel on which he was out- 
ward bound. Gordon, in his compassion, at 
once removed his own coat, and gave it to the 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 47 

improvident but suffering man, and, coatless 
himself, returned to his quarters in the fort. 

So our Saint spent six years of his life ^'in 
slums, hospitals and work-house, or knee-deep 
in the river at v^ork on the Thames defense." 
His friend and biographer, the Vicar of Heavi- 
tree, may well exclaim : ''What a living like- 
ness this seems to be of the life of the God- 
Man, the Lord Jesus Christ, during His short 
residence on this earth ! What sympathy and 
even love for his poorer brethren ! How the 
light, the true light, shines ! What a single 
eye ! A lover of God, a despiser of Mammon. 
In this he outshines Peter the Hermit. Savon- 
arola and Havelock." 

Mr. Arnold White writes of him : "Fourteen 
years have passed since he left Gravesend ; but 
he has left, especially among the poor, so pas- 
sionate a clinging to his memory, that his loss 
is to them a reality which cannot be observed 
without sharing the pain. He never taught 
them that the language of religion is a panacea 
for hunger and despair. Hot-house grapes, car- 
ried nightly to the bedside of a fevered and im- 
provident waterman, and placed one by one in 



48 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

his mouth, were the sort of religious message 
he favoured. A man whose intelligence made 
him fretful on a sick-bed, found by Gordon's 
thought a Daily News delivered every morning 
at his door. In other cases, wines and delicacies 
recommended by physicians, and above all, the 
kindest personal nursing, manifested his care 
for the bodies of suffering men no less than for 
their souls. Three or four boys who were 
taken with scarlet-fever he cared for in his 
own house, nursing them far into the night, 
talking to them and soothing them until they 
fell asleep. He entered into all their concerns, 
caring nothing for himself. He only cared to 
make such happy and industrious, while his 
chief aim, said one who knew, was to lead them 
to the Saviour." He would enter houses in- 
fected with fever when others feared to do so. 
He would often go to the work-house and walk 
with the old men in the yard. With him^ out 
of sight was not out of mind. He was known 
to send a photograph to an old washerwoman. 
So a writer remarks, "he lived a life which 
shows that the most literal following of Christ 
is never an impossibility, or an anachronism. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 49 

He had made for all around him a rift in the 
clouds through which had shone on all the Sun 
of Righteousness, whose light is at once a con- 
suming fire, and healing as a mother-bird's 
brooding wings. Consciously or unconsciously, 
when he went away, children and men and 
women felt they had seen one who had seen 
into Heaven and belonged to it." 



V. 
CSalatx atttl ®«tttval 3^ft;ica. 



GALATZ AND CENTRAL AFRICA. 

r^OLONEL GORDON'S duties at Gravesend 
^^ terminated on the 30th of September, 
1871. His next mission was to Galatz, in Tur- 
key, as British Commissioner to the European 
"Commission of the Danube. This was not a 
post new to him, inasmuch as he laboured there 
in former years, as we have already seen. He left 
Galatz toward the end of 1873. Early in the next 
year he took service with the Khedive of Egypt 
and succeeded Sir Samuel Baker as Governor 
of the tribes in Upper Egypt. While at Con- 
stantinople, in the summer of 1872, he had 
been asked by Nubar Pasha, whom he had 
greatly impressed during the sitting of the 
Danubian Commission, to recommend some 
officer of Engineers to nil the post. A year 
later, Gordon tendered his own services, sub- 
ject to the conditions of an application from 

53 



54 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

the Khedive to the English Government for 
them, and the approval of his own Govern- 
ment. No objection being raised, he went to 
London, made his preparations, and started at 
once for Central Africa, calling at Cairo for 
final instructions. The Khedive proposed to 
give him a salary of £10,000 a year. This Gor- 
don would not hear of or accept, declining to 
be paid more than £2,000. He refused this 
magnificent provision partly because, as he had 
only received £2,000 a year from his own Gov- 
ernment as English Commissioner at Galatz, 
he '' thought it neither patriotic nor honourable 
to accept a larger stipend from a foreign govern- 
ment than he had been receiving from his own." 
" He knew, moreover, that the larger sum would 
have been blood money," wrung from the poor 
people subject to him. He refused, there- 
fore, anything more than a stipend sufficient 
for the expenses of his position. The special 
purpose of this mission was the suppression of 
slave hunting and the establishment of post- 
communication. An account of this period of 
Gordon's life may be found in Hake's '' Story 
of Chinese Gordon," and in Hill's ^'Colonel 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 55 

Gordon in Central Africa." In this latter book 
may be found the letters written home by Gor- 
don; and it has been remarked that '4t may 
be questioned whether any man's letters have 
been better worth publishing." It is not pro- 
posed here to discuss or enlarge upon this 
period of General Gordon's career. His title 
now was: ''His Excellency General Colonel 
Gordon, Governor-General of the Equator 
under the Khedive of Egypt." "An extraor- 
dinary mixture of titles," he writes. His spe- 
cific instructions were " to put down brigand- 
age, and to break up the slave-trading fac- 
tories, giving compensation to the owners ; to 
restore the captive slaves to their homes, or, 
where this was not possible, to settle them 
upon lands in the provinces." As an Egyptian 
Pasha he had also to see that the Egyptian 
Government got its revenue. Gordon started 
out in this enterprise hopefully. It did not 
take him long, however, to discover that the 
Khedive's horror of the slave trade had been 
awakened merely by the fear of Zebehr Pasha's 
setting up an Empire of his own in the slave 
country. Gordon soon came into conflict with 



56 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Nubar Pasha, who had rather expected to 
make use of him. As the General wrote his 
sister: ''Nubar Pasha thought he had a rash 
fellow to deal with, one who could be per- 
suaded to cut a dash, and found he had one of 
the Gordon race ; this latter thought the thing 
real and found it. a sham, and felt like a Gor- 
don who had been humbugged.'' ^'If God 
wills," writes he, ^'I will shake all this in some 
way not clear to me now.'' His account of 
his journey along the Nile to his capital, 
Gondokoro, is full of vivid bits of descrip- 
tion. As time went on, and he saw more 
and more of his Province, his heart became 
filled with compassion for his people. " Poor 
people," he writes, "they are very badly fed 
and appear to be in very much sufi'ering. 
What a mystery, is it not? Why are they 
created ? A life of fear and misery night and 
day ! One does not wonder at their not fearing 
death." '' But I like the work, for I believe I 
can do a great deal to ameliorate the lot of the 
people." He writes to his sister many sad ac- 
counts of the suffering which came before his 
eyes ; yet full as his great heart was of com- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 57 

passion, his letters are not without a touch 
of the humour which always sparkled in his 
thought and speech. " T took," he writes to 
Miss Gordon, '^a poor old bag of bones into my 
camp a month ago, and have been feeding her 
up, but yesterday she was quietly taken off, 
and now knows all things. She had her tobacco 
to the last, and died quite quietly. What a 
change from her misery ! " 

Again : "A wretched sister of yours is 
struggling up the road, but she is such a wasp 
of bones, that, the wind threatening to over- 
throw her, I have sent her some Dhoora and 
will produce a spark of joy in her." 

Next day: ''I am bound to give you the 
sequel of the Rag helped yesterday in the gale 
of wind. I had told my man to see her into 
one of the huts, and thought he had done so. 
The night was stormy and rainy, and when I 
awoke I heard the crying of a child near my 
hut. When I got up I went to see what it was, 
and passing through the gateway, I saw your 
and my sister lying in a pool of mud : her 
black brothers had been passing, and had taken 
no notice of her. To my surprise, she was not 



58 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

dead. After considerable trouble I got three 
black brothers to lift her out of the mud, 
poured some brandy down her throat, and got 
her into a hut with a fire ; having the mud 
washed out of her sightless eyes. She was not 
more than sixteen. There she now lies. T 
cannot help hoping she is floating down with 
the tide to the haven of rest. I dare say you 
will see — in fact, I am sure you will see — your 
black sister some day, and she will tell you all 
about it, and how Infinite Wisdom directed 
the whole affair. I know this is a tough mor- 
sel to believe, hut it is true. I prefer life 
amidst sorrows, if those sorrows are inevit- 
able, to life spent in inaction. Turn where 
you will, there are sorrows. Many a rich per- 
son is as unhappy as this rag of mortality. 
^This mustard is very badly made,' was the 
remark of one of my staff some time ago, when 
some of our brothers were stalking about, 
showing every bone of their poor bodies." 
Again : " The Rag is still alive." And at 
last : ''Your black sister departed this life at 
4 p. M., deeply lamented by me ; not so by her 
black brothers, who considered her a nuisance." 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 59 

Space will not allow further extracts from 
Gordon's letters, nor further incidents of this 
touching period of his life. I must go on 
to relate that "the Governors and local offi- 
cials in his rear were all against him in the 
task he had most at heart, the suppres- 
sion of the slave trade. Even at Cairo he 
found no support. No notice was taken of his 
reports on that head. In fact, neither the 
Khedive nor his Ministers cared a straw for 
the slave trade, so long as the other objects of 
his mission were accomplished. Gordon ac- 
cordingly went back to Cairo, and threw up 
his appointment in December, 1876, refusing to 
go back unless the Khedive would guarantee 
the removal of obstacles. His demands were 
conceded and in February, 1877, Gordon again, 
full of hope, turned his face southward : this 
time as Governor-General of the whole of the 
Soudan, the Equator and the littoral of the 
Red Sea — a territory of 2,000 miles in length 
by 1,000 in breadth. So he writes : " There 
is an end of slavery, if God wills." "Three 
years of incessant labour were spent in sup- 
pressing the slave trade, pacifying hostile 



60 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

tribes, punishing corrupt officials, and every- 
where introducing administrative reforms, and 
everywhere winning the love of the nations by 
his unswerving justice. But the strain told, 
and even Gordon's iron endurance had to yield 
to life in such a climate. He was forced by 
physical signs and warnings not to be neg- 
lected, to think of change." 



VI. 
mxA ^ztnxxx to tUz Momlmx. 



VI. 



INDIA, IRELAND, MAURITIUS, PALESTINE, AND 
RETURN TO THE SOUDAN. 

T N December, 1879, Gordon left Egypt. '' Not 
a day too soon," his physicians said. '*At 
forty-six his strong frame, sustained as it was 
by all his strength of faith and will and buoy- 
ancy of spirit, was all but failing under the 
strain of that burden of war and rule, of cares 
and thwartings and sleepless nights, and days 
of weary travel in desert lands, and sights of 
misery." ''Poor sheath,'' he said of his own 
body, ''it is much worn." 

He was now commanded to rest for months. 
On his return to England, a few weeks were 
spent in London and Southampton. In May, 
1880, he was appointed Secretary to the 
new Viceroy of India, Lord Ripon. He soon 
found, however, that his great experience 
as a ruler had unfitted him for such a post ; 

63 



64 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

and it has been hinted that he found diplo- 
matic ^wess^ unsuited to his nature. He made 
no delay, when he saw how misplaced he was, 
and resigned promptly in June. Just at this 
juncture he was summoned to China on the 
mission of peace already spoken of. He re- 
turned to London in 1881, and soon afterward 
visited Ireland, where, as Hake remarks, " he 
gave his whole soul to her troubles. A friend, 
to whom he addressed his views, published 
them. They were daring, they were new, they 
were thorough, but they were not such views 
as the majority could approve, and they met 
with some adverse criticism and a little ridi- 
cule. Gordon cared as much for one as for the 
other." He soon after went to Brussels to 
visit the King of the Belgians, thence to Lau- 
sanne. (There his brother, Enderby Gordon, 
who had lately died, had passed part of his 
illness, and there the Vicar of Heavitree, Mr. 
Barnes, first met General Gordon in company 
with his nephew, Mr. Charles H. Gordon, who 
now, as all American admirers of his uncle 
will be glad to know, has made his home on 
this side the water.) Soon after, he was ordered 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 65 

to Mauritius as commanding Royal Engineer. 
On the 6th of March, 1881, he was made a 
Major-General, and on the 4th of April, 1882, 
left Mauritius for the Cape. A little more 
than five months afterwards he went to the 
Holy Land, where at last he could rest. '' He 
could depart for Mount Carmel," as Hake says, 
"and be alone." He took up his residence out- 
side Jerusalem, where he spent a few quiet 
months in the survey of the Holy City, to 
establish, if possible, certain convictions he 
had as to the mystic relationships of the sitOj 
the whole treatment of which may be found 
in his book "Reflections in Palestine." Here 
he lived, " winning, as usual, love and enthusi- 
astic reverence ; receiving, as often as possible, 
the Blessed Sacrament," and, in short, as one 
of his biographers writes, passed "a quiet 
Retreat in the Holy Land ; led, perhaps, apart 
into a desert place to rest awhile, by the Voice 
he always sought to follow, in preparation for 
the final conflict and the last sacrifice." 

Whilst our Saint was in Retreat at Jerusa- 
lem, the King of the Belgians summoned him 
to Brussels, in accordance with a promise Gor- 



66 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

don had made him that he would go to the 
Congo to help on the King's philanthropic 
plans for founding a Free State, to be a centre 
of civilization in that region. He at once 
sailed from Jaffa by the first ship. It was a 
wretched vessel, on which he was almost ship- 
wrecked, being driven in a storm a hundred 
miles out of its course. He was willing to ac- 
cept the commission of the King, and at once 
sought the consent of his own government, 
which, after making some difficulties, finally 
yielded. The General at once set out from 
Brussels for the Congo, via Southampton. H 
has been said that it was only this happy acci- 
dent, as we call such things, of the recall of 
Gordon by King Leopold that brought, at this 
critical moment, the General within reach of 
the British Government, '' in an hour of dire 
perplexity." 

Whilst Gordon was in Palestine, a Prophet 
or Pretender, the Mahdi, had arisen in the 
Soudan, claiming a divine mission and pro- 
claiming the establishment of "an universal 
equality, an universal law and a community 
of goods." "There was enough misery in the 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 67 

Soudan to draw the wretched people the Mahdi 
promised to rescue, to the standard of any de- 
liverer/' Eleven thousand troops under Hicks 
Pasha, an English officer, had been entrapped 
into an ambush and annihilated. At that mo- 
ment there were between Dongola and Gondo- 
koro, the capital of General Gordon's former 
Government, 21,000 Egyptian troops scattered 
in various garrisons, and a whole population 
of civilians, loyal to the Egyptian Government. 
The Mahdi's power had rapidly increased, and 
many important places were besieged by his 
hordes. Meanwhile, as we have seen, Gordon 
had reached England, en route for the Congo. 
He had spent a night at Heavitree Vicarage 
with his friend, the Vicar, and on Friday morn- 
ing, January 11th, had received the Blessed 
Sacrament in the Parish Church. This was 
the last Communion he made in England, save 
on the Sunday before his departure, of which 
more hereafter. That same morning he had 
visited Bishop Temple, and later in the day 
had gone on to Sandford Orleigh, Sir Samuel 
Baker's house. While driving to the house, 
Sir Samuel pressed on Gordon the expediency 



68 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

of his again going to the Soudan as Governor- 
General, if Her Majesty's Government should 
require it. On the next day, January 12th, 
Gordon received a telegram from Lord Wolse- 
ley, asking him to come to London. Gordon 
ooeyed, and on the 15th had an interview with 
him. Their conversation led to nothing defi- 
nite and Gordon, on the 16th, departed for 
Brussels. Lord Wolseley again summoned 
him to London and Gordon submitted the mat- 
ter to his friend, the Belgian King. As the 
result, Gordon left Brussels, and on the 18th 
was at Lord Wolseley's office. Later in the 
day he saw Lord Granville, Lord Hartington, 
Lord Northbrook and Sir Charles Dilke, and it 
was decided that he was to proceed to the Sou- 
dan as the representative of the British Gov- 
ernment, but in no way responsible to the 
Khedive. His mission was to superintend the 
evacuation of the Soudan. He was to with- 
draw the Egyptian garrisons, the civil officials, 
and as many of the inhabitants as might wish 
to be taken away. Taking with him Colonel 
Stewart, who, like himself^ eventually fell a 
martyr, he started for Khartoum that same 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 69 

evening (the 18th), at 8 o'clock. He was ac- 
companied to the station by the Duke of Cam- 
bridge, Lord Wolseley and others. Lord Wolse- 
ley^ it may be here remarked, was Gordon's 
comrade in the Crimea, and he declared some 
time ago that Gordon was one of the only two 
heroes he had ever known, the other being 
General Robert E. Lee. 



VII. 
site lurt, 



VII. 



THE END. 



'T^HE rest is well-known matter of history. 
Gordon arrived at Khartoum after a most 
wonderful and rapid journey across the desert, 
making the distance in exactly thirty days 
after his leaving London. The people received 
him with rapture, kissing his hands and feet. 
^'I come," he said, ''without soldiers, but with 
God on my side, to redress the evils of the Sou- 
dan. I will not fight with any weapons but 
justice. There shall be no more Bashi-Bazouks; 
I will hold the balance level." " He then held 
a levee, at which the poorest might pour out 
their grievances. The people appeared in thou- 
sands ; with the aid of Colonel Stewart he 
inquired into their grievances, remitted public 
debts, publicly burnt instruments of torture, 
and delivered prisoners of all ages, old men 
and boys, who had been unjustly imprisoned 



73 



74 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

for years." At the same time he issued a 
proclamation, declaring the independence of 
the Soudan, granting an amnestj^ and taking 
various other measures in the best interests of 
the country, as it stood. He proceeded to send 
down sick men, women and children into 
Egypt ; but it was impossible to remove the 
garrisons until he had taken steps for the 
establishment of a stable government. He de- 
sired that Zebehr Pasha, a man of great influ- 
ence in the Soudan, should be made Governor- 
General after the evacuation, and that the 
native Sultans should be reinstated in their 
privileges. The British Government peremp- 
torily refused to sanction Zebehr's appoint- 
ment. Gordon then asked for troops from 
Cairo and the Red Sea. Meantime relief did 
not come, and little by little he was environed 
by the forces of the False Prophet. Khartoum 
was besieged on the 12th of March, and from 
that time until the following January, when 
he died, Gordon was engaged in defending the 
city against its assailants. "The record of his 
achievements and heroism in this memorable 
siege will form one of the most heart-stirring 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 75 

pages in English history. Nothing could ex- 
ceed his military efficiency, inventiveness, re- 
source ; nothing could exceed his moral influ- 
ence in the city over troops and people." " He 
built steamers, defended his exterior lines by 
means of wire entanglements with live shells 
as mines." The authorities in England re- 
mained strangely and unpardonably indifferent 
to the situation. Gordon implored that troops 
should be sent, not for his own rescue, but for 
the sake of redeeming the pledges he had made 
to his people. In September, Colonel Stewart 
and the French and English Consuls started on 
the homeward journey, which ended so fatally, 
in order that the English Government might 
learn the whole truth. In August, England at 
last aroused herself, and Lord Wolseley was 
appointed to conduct an expedition for the 
relief of Khartoum. But it was too late. 
After various vicissitudes and delays. Sir 
Charles Wilson, with several of Gordon's own 
steamers (sent to meet him), full of troops, 
reached the city on the 28th of January, only 
to find it in possession of the'Mahdi, and Gor- 
don — dead. On the 26th of January he had 



76 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

been betrayed ; the gates of the city had been 
opened to the enemy and by the knife of an 
assassin the soul of our matchless hero ascended 
to God. He had yielded up his life for Eng- 
land and humanity. So perished, through the 
supineness of the English Ministry, ''Gordon, 
the Magnanimous." "^ 

* Note.— Since the above was written, the attention of 
the writer has been called to the following extract from the 
London Telegraph of the 27th of January: 

THE GORDON ANNIVERSARY. 
A special funeral service in commemoration of General Gordon's death 
was held yesterday afternoon at St. Paul's, Eaton square, at 5 p. m. There 
were present about 200 persons, mostly friends of the deceased officer. The 
Rev. H. Waller, an old personal friend of General Gordon, preached the 
sermon, and during the discourse read the following sworn testimony of one 
of the loyal sergeants who was present at General Gordon's death, and 
which was communicated to Lieutenant Gordon, nephew of the late General. 
The sergeant said he was formerly in the garrison of Berber, but escaped at 
its fall to Khartoum, where he was one of four sergeants orderlies to Gor- 
don. He was on duty on January 26, and was with Gordon, on the "look- 
out " on the top of the palace. Gordon, the evening before, warned the 
people that he had seen a great deal of extra excitement going on in the 
rebel camp, and that unless a good resistance were made that night the town 
would fall. As the morning star rose the rebels made a feint at a portion of 
the defenses, under Ferag Pasha with the black troops; but at the same time 
they directed their full attack at the defense commanded by Hassan Bey Ben 
Assereh, with the 5th Regiment of Fellaheen, and succeeded in getting into 
the town. When Gordon heard the rebels in the town he said, "• It is all 
finished; to-day Gordon will be killed," and went down stairs, followed by 
the four sergeants, who took their rifles with them. He took a chair, and 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 77 

''Thus ended," says the Vicar of Heavitree, 
'' a career as romantic and as noble as any that 
the modern world has seen. When the terrible 
tidings were made known, England mourned 
for Gordon as she has seldom mourned even 
for her heroes. His unworldly temper, his 
ardent faith, his magnificent energy, his sub- 
lime unselfishness : in all this there was some- 
thing which captivated the heart of the nation, 
and it needed but the crowning glory of his 
death to evoke an expression of love and 
reverence to w^hich there is hardly a parallel 
in history. They who knew him best knew 
that his countrymen had obeyed a true instinct 



eat down on the right of the palace door, the four sergeants standing on hie 
left. All at once a Sheikh galloped up with some Bagaree Arabs. The ser- 
geants were on the point of firing when Gordon, seizing one of their rifles, 
said, " No need of rifles to-day; Gordon is to be killed " (as before). The 
Sheikh told Gordon that he had been ordered by the Mahdi to bring him 
alive. Gordon refused to go, saying he would die where he was, adding that 
no harm was to be done to the four sergeants, who had not fired on the rebels. 
The Sheikh repeated the order three times, and each time Gordon gave the 
same answer. After a few words the Sheikh drew his sword, and, rushing up 
to Gordon, cut him over the left shoulder, Gordon looking him straight in the 
face and offering no resistance. His head was cut off and taken to the 
Mahdi at Omdurman, and his body was buried close to the door of the palace 
and a tomb built over it. The tomb is treated with respect. The letter was 
handed to Mr. Waller a few days since by General Sir Gerald Graham, V. C, 
who commanded the troops at Suakin. 



78 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

in placing him, even while he lived, beside 
those whose names are 'on fame's eternal 
bead-roll worthy to be filed.' With regard to 
Gordon's character, there are no popular illu- 
sions to be dispelled. The more closely it is 
studied, the deeper will be the admiration 
excited by his strength, his tenderness, his 
purity and his honour." 



VIII. 
gevsou ami pXauuevs. 



VIII. 

PERSON AND MANNERS. 

" I "HE grateful duty yet remains of describing 
the man : his appearance, manners, hab- 
its, cast of mind, special devotions and ultimate 
aims. 

The pictures commonly seen of General Gor- 
don are very unsatisfactory. The one which, 
on the whole, seems the most vraisemhlahle, is 
that which appeared in the London Illustrated 
News not long after his death. The likenesses 
prefixed to Hake's "Story of Chinese Gordon" 
and to Forbes' sketch of him seem very expres- 
sionless and characterless ; nor can much be 
said of that prefixed to his ''Journals," al- 
though, artistically, this last has much merit. 
The last picture for which he sat was that 
taken for the King of the Belgians, but being 
taken in civilian's dress, it does not express the 

whole idea of the man. In the portrait pub- 
si 



82 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

lishecl by the London Illustrated Neivs, one sees 
the soldier, knight, the gray-haired man of 
fifty: strong, determined, with a smile playing 
about the mouth, and with eyes drawn by sor- 
row and tears. A representation of him, which 
appeared in the London Graphic in March, 1885, 
has a softer expression, looks less robust, but 
has more of the suggestion of faith, and love, 
and prayer. Doubtless this protean man, like 
many others of his temperament and consti- 
tution, at different times looked differently^ 
Some portraits, however, tell the whole story, 
or the deepest secrets, of a man's nature, and 
so with the likenesses above specified as most 
satisfactory. 

Hake says of him that he was ''slightly 
built, somewhat below the middle height. His 
face was almost boyish in its youthful ness, his 
step as light and his movements as lithe as 
those of a leopard." His friend, the Reverend 
Mr. Barnes, of Heavitree, says of him : " He was 
of the middle height and very strongly built ; 
his face was furrowed with deep lines ; his fine, 
broad brow and most determined chin indi- 
cated a remarkable power of grave and practi- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 88 

cal thought. He appeared to be as gentle as 
he was strong, for there was a certain tender- 
ness in the tones of his rich, unworn voice and 
in the ghmce of his delicately expressive bine 
eyes." Mr. Arthur Stannard, one of Colonel 
Gordon's subordinates at Gravesend, says of 
those eyes : '' What eyes they w^ere ! Keen 
and clear, filled with the beauty of holiness ; 
bright, with an unnatural brightness, * ^ * 
their colour blue -grey. '■' '^' '^ I know not 
what effect those eyes had on all whom he 
came in contact with, though from the unfail- 
ing and willing obedience with which his orders 
were carried out, I fancy that, to some extent, 
he unconsciously mesmerized nine out of ten 
to do his will ; but I know that upon me theii* 
effect was to raise a wild longing, a desperate 
desire to do something, anything at his bid- 
ding. It was not that any evil thought or sus- 
picion lurked within the windows of his brave 
and pure soul ; his power was the power of 
resolute goodness, and it was strong — so strong 
that, I am sure, had he told me to stand on my 
head, or to perform some impossible feat, I 
should certainly have tried my utmost to ac- 



84 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

complisli it without giving a moment for re- 
flection as to whether the order was reasonable 
or not." Colonel Chaille-Long, by no means a 
friendly commentator, says of him : " His flfty 
years sit very lightly upon him. An active 
body and mind, ruddy complexion and almost 
boyish manner, make him appear younger than 
he is. His step is light, and his movements 
are quick." I may add, that his head was a 
very noble one; brow and chin square and 
strong ; hair white and stiff, crisp and curly; 
side whiskers trimmed ; moustache strong and 
close to the lip. 

Thus we see in our hero certain of the char- 
acteristics of wdiat has been called " the physi- 
ognomy of the Saints ": that supernatural light 
in the expression, which Stannard calls unnat- 
ural ; that singular power in the eye, which 
S. Gregory and S. Bernard are said to have had, 
together with that alertness of movement and 
gaiety of manner so remarkable in S. Philip 
Neri. 

Gordon's manners were singularly engag- 
ing : sincere, impulsive, stern, when the mo- 
ment needed sternness ; thoughtful, and con- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 85 

siderate, and merciful, when gentleness was 
the rule of duty. He was singularly free from 
all affectations, full of humour, and with a turn 
of expression now and then worthy of Ruskin 
or Caiiyle. Indeed, Chaille-Long says of him : 
" He is a strange composition of a Cromwell, a 
Havelock, a Carlyle and a Livingstone." I add, 
a combination with the above, of S. Louis of 
France, the Chevalier Bayard, S. Martin of 
Tours, and S. Philip Neri. 

"A very real and human man he was," says 
Stannard ; "as great, as good, and as true as 
any have described him — not a colourless Saint 
without a flaw or fault to retrieve his goodness 
from monotony, as some would have us con- 
ceive him, but a man whose genius was too 
brilliant, and whose parts were too strong, to 
be without corresponding weaknesses and pre- 
judices almost as marked as his talents. * * * 
In spite of the beautiful goodness of his heart 
and the great breadth of his charity, Gordon 
was far from possessing a placid temperament, 
or from being patient over small things. His 
very energy and his singlemindedness tended 
to make him impatient." " His strength and 



86 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

weakness were most fantastically mingled. 
There was no trace of timidity in him, or he 
never could have occupied his unique position 
in the world, "^^ * '^ but '=' "^ * he was 
extremely sensitive to the feelings of others 
who might be affected by his doings." '^ * * 
When he believed any course to be right, and 
that it was his duty to follow it, he was abso- 
lutely indifferent to all dissuading or moderat- 
ing influences. But ''his desire to efface him- 
self amounted almost to a disease.*' The Vicar 
of Heavitree says of him: "I have never 
known anyone who had the same faculty of 
winning the confidence, love, and reverence of 
those who happened to be brought into rela- 
tion with him. He had a kind of spiritual 
power which exercised a singular fascination 
when one talked with him about the subjects 
on which he most frequently and most deeply 
meditated. * ''^ * The seriousness of Gor- 
don's temper did not prevent him from being a 
bright and agreeable companion, especially 
when those with whom he talked could join 
him in smoking a cigarette. He had a keen 
sense of humour, and on every matter on which 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 87 

he cared to form an opinion he spoke clearly 
and decisively." 

(Hake relates an instance of his humour. 
During his first Governor-Generalship, to his 
disgust, he had to live in a palace as large as 
Marlborough House. "Some two hundred ser- 
vants and orderlies were in attendance ; they 
added to his discomfort by obliging him to live 
according to the niceties of an inflexible code 
of etiquette. He was sternly forbidden to rise 
to receive a guest, or to offer a chair; if he 
*rose, everyone else did the same. He was 
'guarded like an ingot of gold.' This formality 
was detestable to him, but he made a good deal 
of fan of it, and more than once, while certain 
solemnities were proceeding, he would delight 
the great chiefs, his visitors, by remarking in 
English (of which they knew nothing), 'Now, 
old bird, it's time for you to go.' ") 

"Although he was quick to perceive the 
passing moods of his friends, and to give them 
his sympathy in their troubles, there was 
always a tone of self-restraint in his ordinary 
conversation. Perhaps his manner may be 
most accurately described as that of a pro- 



88 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

fessed and accomplished diplomatist, using the 
word diplomatist in its best sense. His educa- 
tional experience, his study of the weight 
which might be attached to each of his words, 
his long, unbroken silence in the Soudan— all 
this had helped to make him not sententious, 
but habitually impressive toward those whom 
he addressed. * * * Grordon was much less 
at ease in talking to women than in talking to 
men. While conversing with women he seemed 
to exercise more than his usual self-control in 
the expression of his thought and feeling. His^ 
sympathy, geniality and attractiveness became, 
as it were, veiled ; and he was ' himself again ' 
only when the restraint was removed. He 
was seen at his best in the society of young 
children, his keen interest in whom had not 
been dulled either by solitude, or by the neces- 
sity — which had often been imposed upon him 
in other relations — for strictly guarded inter- 
course. With children he was quite at home, 
and they instinctively felt that in him they 
had a friend who understood them and whom 
they could trust and love." 

The author of the " Schonberg-Cotta Fam- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 89 

ily," writing of Gordon, says : "We feel in him, 
amidst all the naturalness as of a little child, 
the strangeness also as of childhood that has 
not yet learned our poor earthly values, or 
quite learned our low, earthly language. It is 
not that he tries to renounce the poor prizes of 
this world ; he, like Joan of Arc, and the rest 
of that highest society, simply does not value 
them." " He was simply awake in a world of 
dreamers ; the walls of the cells of self which 
imprison us, were broken ; he was under the 
open sky. He saw tha wrongs and sufferings 
of other men, of weaker races, as an angel 
from another world may see them, not dimly 
or vaguely, but with the widest, keenest and 
most acute vision. From the first we see m 
him the same combination : the keen eye and 
quick resource of the soldier, with the vision 
into the spiritual combat always underlying 
all external troubles, and the ceaseless waging 
of the true warfare there." "The high-bred 
modesty and reticence of his nature, which 
belong to the true knights of all ages, made 
* * * publicity a vulgarity to him, and the 



90 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

high mj^stical faith in the indwelling presence 
of God made it a profanation." 

At Khartoum we see additional traits man- 
ifesting themselves. Mr. Frank Power, a com- 
IDanion for a time at Khartoum, but murdered 
with Colonel Stewart, writes : " Gordon is a 
most lovable character: quiet, mild, gentle and 
strong. He is humble, too. The way in which 
he pats 5"ou on the shoulder when he says, 
^Look here, dear fellow, now what do you ad- 
vise?' would make you love him. When he 
goes out of doors there are always crowds of 
Arab men and women at the gate to kiss his 
feet, and twice to-day the furious women, wish- 
ing to lift his feet to kiss them, threw him 
over. He appears to like me, and already calls 
me 'Frank.' He likes my going so much 
among the natives. Not to do so is a mortal 
sin in his eyes. He is Dictator here ; the Mahdi 
has gone down before him and to-day sent him 
a ' salaam,' or message of welcome. It is won- 
derful that one man should have such influence 
over 200,000 people. Numbers of women flock 
here every day, to ask him to touch their chil- 
dren to cure them. They call him the Father 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 91 

and the Saviour of the Soudan. He has found 
me badly up in Thomas a Kempis, which he 
reads every day, and has given me an ^Imita- 
tion of Christ.' '• Again Power writes : '' I 
like Gordon more and more every day ; he has 
a most lovable manner and disposition, and is 
so kind to me. He is glad if you show the 
smallest desire to help him in his great trouble. 
How one man could have dared to attempt his 
task, I wonder. One day of his work and 
bother would kill another man, yet he is cheer- 
ful at breakfast, lunch and dinner ; but I know 
he suffers dreadfully from low spirits. I hear 
him walking up and down his room all night 
(it is next to mine). It is only his great piety 
which carries him through." 

I may remark just here a circumstance 
which gave a remarkable heroism to Gordon's 
energy and activity. He had been long a vic- 
tim to that most cruel and painful form of 
heart disease, angina pectoris, than which there 
is probably no ailment of the body more dread- 
ful and more agonizing. It requires quiet, both 
of body and of mind, to keep it under; yet, 
though the incredible statement had been 



92 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

made that he had over one hundred attacks of 
its paroxysms before leaving England, Gordon 
undertook his wonderful camel-ride across the 
desert, and his year of dreadful anxiety and 
worry in the Soudan. One cannot but recall 
an expression used by him long before in a 
letter written at Jerusalem : '' I have now a 
sense of very great weariness; not discontent, 
but a desire to put off the burden. God gives 
me comforting thoughts, but — one's body is 
tired of it." 

In the book sent home, which he gave to 
Power (Cardinal Newman's " Dream of Geron- 
tius ") are underlined passages which give deep 
glimpses into Gordon's heart: "Pray for me, 
my friend!" '''Tis death, loving friends, 
your prayers, 'tis he !" " So pray for me, my 
friends, who have not strength to pray r 



IX. 



IX. 

DEVOTIONAL HABITS. 

A LREADY we have touched upon points 
^^^ connected with the habits of our Saint, 
e. g., his devotion of the early hours of the day 
to God, and of the later hours to works of char- 
ity. We shall further on saj^ a word in refer- 
ence to his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. 
It may be remarked, however, just here (quot- 
ing from an editorial in the Church Pi^ess of.. 
March 7, 1885), that ''he had a fixed belief that 
only from Christ In the Blessed Sacrament 
could flow the strength of high resolve and the 
grace to carry through to an end his lofty pur- 
poses. Hence he was a constant and a devout 
communicant, never missing an opportunity of 
receiving at the Altar the soul-strengthening 
food on which he rested for help, nor when cut 
off from the Sacred Banquet did he ever neglect 
to hold daily spiritual communion with his 

95 



96 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Lord as Giver of that Actual Food.'' A curious 
story is told of him in connection with the last 
Sunday he spent in England (which, however, 
I find it difficult to reconcile with the dates). 
He had a fixed presentiment that he should 
never return from the Soudan. He distributed 
little trinkets and mementos among his friends 
as remembrances, and then prepared himself 
for his Viaticum. It is said that on the last 
Saturday in which he was in London, he care- 
fully ascertained the churches and hours at 
which the Blessed Sacrament would be attain- 
able on the following day ; and then begin- 
ning early in the morning of Sunday, he went 
from church to church until noon, assisting 
at the Holy Sacrifice and communicating at 
each Altar. This, of course, was most unu- 
sual. I only know of two modern precedents for 
duplication, or multiplication, of Communions 
in one day. Certain of the early Jesuits, it is 
said, in the first fervour of their love, commu- 
nicated more than once daily, and in Caven- 
dish's '' Life of Wolsey," the Cardinal is said, 
on one occasion, first to have said his own Mass 
and then to have assisted at a Pontifical Cele- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 97 

bration in the presence of the King of France, 
and to have, with the King, received the Host 
divided between them. The Saints, however, 
such as Gordon was, are not expected to con- 
form to ordinary measures and standards of 
things. It was the last day on which our 
Saint could ever meet his Lord on His Altar 
Throne. He wished to fill himself up full, as 
it were, of that Bread of Life, before, as one 
touchingly says, he went into the ''darkness.'^ 
The whole passage I shall give from Dean 
Bradley's sermon at Westminster Abbey : '' We 
know the story," says he ; " he passes, single- 
handed, or with one chosen comrade, Colonel 
Stewart, whose name will be dear to England 
— passes into the growing darkness, into a ris- 
ing tide of turbulence and fanaticism, and dark- 
faced African men kiss his hands and feet as 
he rides into the doomed city." 

From that city he ascended to that place 
and to that Friend, of both which he had long 
before touchingly written : '' Oh ! for that 
home, where the wicked cease from troubling 
and the weary have rest ; where the good fight 
will have been fought, the dusty labour fin- 



98 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

ished, and a crown of life given ; when our 
eyes will behold the only One that ever knew 
our sorrows and trials, and has borne with us 
in them all, soothing and comforting our weary 
souls. No New Friend to be made then, but 
an Old Friend." To that Friend, indeed, he 
went. But on that last Sunday in London, he 
pressed to his lips for the last time that Pre- 
cious Sacrament of Life, and Joy, and Light, 
so dear to his detached and heavenly soul. 

A habit of his older African days is thus 
described by Colonel Chaille-Long : " In the 
short interval of my stay in camp, going or 
returning from expeditions, I had occasion to 
remark the singular habit which Gordon had 
of retiring to his hut, where he would remain, 
for days at a time, engaged in the perusal and 
meditation of his ever-present Bible and Prayer 
Book. When in this retirement his orders 
were that he should not be disturbed for any 
reason of service whatever ; a hatchet and flag 
were placed at his door as a sign that he was 
unapproachable. When they were removed, 
Gordon would re-appear in full dress, cleanly 
shaven, and the ill-humour which he had suf- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 99 

fered had vanished, to give place to cheerful- 
ness. On such occasions he would come into 
my hut in almost boyish glee and say, 'Come 
now, Long, old fellow, let's have a good break- 
fast.' " 

Another of the General's habits was that of 
intercessory prayer. One of his biographers 
remarks : "Among the things most character- 
istic of him is the number of people remem- 
bered day by day in intercession, in his hours 
of communion with God." Hake writes : " The 
Oross's true soldier, a mystic and a leader of 
men, he fights and conquers much as Columbus 
voyaged and as Cromwell ruled." ''Praying 
for the people ahead of me whom I am about 
to visit," he says, " gives me much strength ; 
and it is wonderful how something seems al- 
ready to have passed between us when I meet 
a chief for whom I have prayed, for the first 
time. On this I base my hopes of a triumphal 
march. * * * I have really no troops with 
me, but I have the Shekinah, and I do like 
trusting to Him, and not to man." "These 
extracts," says Barnes, "show how Gordon 
quieted all earthly anxiety by making every 



100 CHAELES GEORGE GORDON. 

request known unto God. In his endeavours 
after the Christian life he looked far beyond 
that which has become in England a usual but 
dangerous limit. He never let himself rest 
short of the hope of complete union with 
Christ. * * * Gordon desired progress and 
found our sanctification through union with 
God in Christ. Hence he approached and 
understood the Sacraments as a part of that 
which has been ordained from the first, even 
before the world began." Hake writes : " The 
^Imitation of Christ' is his favourite book. 
' This is my book, and although I shall never 
be able to attain to a hundredth part of the 
perfection of that Saint, I strive toward it. 
The ideal is here.' He (Gordon) carries the 
saintly ideal of the cloister into the turmoil of 
the camp, and his selfless abnegation and hu- 
mility are only broken by a horror of public 
praise." 



©ast of plltitl auxX ^xxntlamjetxtal 
^tlxQions Ideas. 



X. 



CAST OF MIND AND FUNDAMENTAL RELIGIOUS 
IDEAS. 

/^ENERAL GORDON'S cast of mind and 
^"^ feeling may have been already largely 
deduced from what has thus far been said. 
Four fundamental points, stated by himself, 
lay at the basis of his character : First, entire 
self-forgetfulness ; secondly, simplicity, or the 
absence of all pretension ; thirdly, refusal to ac- 
cept, as a motive, the world's praise or disap- 
proval ; fourthly, the following in all things the 
will of God. His favourite motto was : " Be 
not moved;" or, ''Be not thou greatly moved." 
''The main point," he writes, "is to be just and 
straightforward ; to fear no one, or no one's 
sayings ; and to avoid all tergiversation or 
twisting, even if you lose by it." " Hoist your 
flag and abide by it." He had a great horror 
of evil speaking. " The tongue," he says, " is a 

103 



104 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

sure barometei- of the heart, and it is one we 
can see, and others see at once. Is it not to us 
a great preventive against evil speaking to 
communicate worthily ? * * * It is pos- 
sible for men to communicate worthily, though 
this is not possible while they continue their 
fearfully treacherous words against one an- 
other. I speak of the common parlance of 
life, where we are all so apt to err. We could 
not keep repeating that unkind, amusing story 
of X or Y. If we were often communicating, 
it would choke us ! There is a close analogy 
in the remedy and the sickness, as shown by 
the tongue, the first member to touch the for- 
bidden fruit. We can tell how we are pro- 
gressing by the tongue quicker than by any 
other way. * * * We become very stupid 
to the world, but poor, wounded souls come to 
us ; they know that he who keeps his tongue 
will not plant bitter words, like barbed stings, 
in their wounds. Christ is the corner of defense 
to that man. If we look into our past life, we 
can see that a few years ago we should not 
have given a thought about saying things 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 105 

which now we can not say without a twinge 
of conscience." 

Gordon's most memorable sayings may be 
found in a little compendium known as "Chi- 
nese Gordon, the Uncrowned King," by L. C. 
Holloway ; also, in the Gordon Birthday Book. 
This sketch has already grown so lengthy that I 
dare not indulge myself in detailing them. 1 
go on to say that three great ideas filled the 
mind of General Gordon, over and above the 
general principles we have been speaking of : 
First, the sovereignty of God over men's lives in 
general and in detail; secondly, the reality of the 
gift of our Lord's Body and Blood in the Blessed 
Sacrament ; thirdly^ the indwelling of the Holy 
Ghost in each baptized man. Belief in the first 
of these has gained him the name of a fatalist, 
but as he explains himself, no one can call him 
such in any objectionable way. "If," says he, 
^'we could take all things as ordained and for 
the best, we should, indeed, be conquerors of 
the world. Nothing has ever happened to man 
so bad as he has anticipated it to be. If we 
should be quiet under our troubles, they would- 
not be so painful to bear. I cannot separate 



106 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

the existence of a God from his preordination 
and direction of all things, good and evil ; the 
latter he permits, but still controls.'' And 
again: "I have become what people call a 
fatalist, namely, I trust God w^ill pull me 
through every difficulty. The solitary grand- 
eur of the desert makes one feel how^ vain is 
the effort of man. This carries me through 
my troubles and enables me to look on death 
as a coming relief, when it is His will. * * * 
It is only my firm conviction that I am only an 
instrument put in use for a time — (' the chisel 
in the hands of the carpenter,' as he elsewhere 
says) — that enables me to bear up, and in my 
present state, during my long, hot, weary rides, 
I think my thoughts better and clearer than I 
should with a companion." " It will be seen," 
Hake remarks, "that Gordon's fatalism was 
not a belief in Unchanging Destiny independ- 
ent of a Controlling Cause, but a deep faith in 
a Controlling Cause which guides the erring 
and props the weak." "Here are some of the 
maxims which he has made himself, and by 
which his spiritual life is governed : ' It is a 
delightful thing to be a fatalist^ not as that 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 107 

word is generally employed, but to accept that, 
when things happen and not before, God has, for 
soDie wise reason, so ordained them to happen 
— all things, nob only the great things, but all 
the circumstances of life': that is what is meant 
to me by the words, ^ ye are dead,' in S. Paul to 
the Colossians." Again : "We have nothing 
further to do when the scroll of events is un- 
rolled than to accept them as being for the 
best. Before it is imrolled, is another matter : 
"and you could not say I sat still, and let things 
happen with this belief. All I can say is, that 
amidst troubles and worries no one can have 
peace till he thus stays upon his God ; it gives 
a man superhuman strength." 

"I gave you," he writes, "'Watson on Con- 
tentment;' it is this true exposition of how 
happiness is to be obtained, /. e., submission to 
the will of God, whatever that will may be. 
He who can say he realizes this, has overcome 
the world and its trials. Everything that hap- 
pens to-day, good or evil, is settled and fixed, 
and it is no use fretting over it. The quiet, 
peaceful life of our Lord was solely due to His 
submission to God's will. There will be times 



108 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

when a strain will come on one : and as the 
strain, so will your strength be." 

This is, I may say, the language of all the 
Saints, of all the Masters of the Spiritual Life. 
There is nothing they more insist upon than 
conformity to the will of God in what one 
calls the '' sacrament of the present moment.'' 
No trait of Gordon's character or mind seems 
to me more distinctly saintly than this, as his 
words quoted above reveal it. Arbitrary pre- 
destination to heaven or hell, men rightly feel 
to be contrary to God's justness and fairness. 
The predestination of the course and com- 
plexion of a man's life, is a different thing. 
"Every soul," Monseigneur Dupanloup has said^ 
''is a thought of God (ijensee de Dieu)^ Just 
as it has been said of the Saints, " Chaciin des 
Saints est tin mot dhin discours infinij une note 
d^une symiohonie immense^ It is the life which 
makes and trains the man, and which indicates 
him. The life, therefore, with its details — 
especially when men consciously put them- 
selves into the hands of God to be led — is the 
work of God : part of His thought or concep- 
tion of the man. And it is the undermost 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 109 

foundation of a calm and peaceful soul that it 
reposes itself upon the omniscient and omnip- 
otent will of God. 

We pass now to a word respecting General 
Gordon's Eucharistic beliefs. One finds the 
subject largely drawn out in his "Reflections 
in Palestine," a book singularly mystic, and 
above the interest of general readers, or even 
of the average theologian. In an article in 
the Fortnightly Revieiv of July, 1884, by Mr. W. 
H. Mallock, one may find his views in larger 
detail. They are much mingled with his mys- 
tic speculations, and the first feeling one has 
on reading them is that of criticism. One may 
be guarded against this impulse, however, by 
the words of Dr. Alexander, the Bishop of Ber- 
ry, and of Dr. Wordsworth, the late Bishop of 
Lincoln. The Bishop of Derry writes : " The 
General is not a professional theologian, but 
he is something far higher and better, and I 
dare not criticise one so immeasurably above 
me, even if I were not intellectually convinced 
by his arguments. He is an example of faith 
in the Living God." While General Gordon 
was in Palestine, Bishop Wordsworth, of Lin- 



110 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

coin, wrote of him: ''I should be greatly 
obliged to you, if you would express to him 
my deep interest in his investigations and 
thoughts. I am glad to know that the very 
interesting subject (Biblical investigation) has 
the benefit of an enquirer like General Gor- 
don, who sees divine things and places, not 
with the natural organ only, but with the eye 
of faith." It may be remarked just here that 
this great Bishop had a profound respect for 
Gordon, and strikingly said of him that he had 
''the faults of a Saint and the courage of a 
Hero." The present Archbishop of Canter- 
bury wTote to Mr. Barnes : " My Dear Prebend- 
ary : Accept my thanks for your kindness in 
sending me General Gordon's 'Reflections in 
Palestine,' and for your kind letter. The 
former is a wonderful expression of a devout 
soul with deep resources, and full of faithful 
life towards God." 

And now to discover the General's views 
themselves. Starting from the statement of 
S. Paul that " the Prince of the power of the 
air worketh the children of disobedience in 
disobedience," he would urge that Satan be 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Ill 

gan to work in man when our first parents 
disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit. 
"Had Eve never eaten what was forbidden, 
she never could have been worked in by the 
spirit of disobedience, Satan." "If the Prince 
of the power of the air works in the chil- 
dren of disobedience, he must at one time 
have worked in every one, for all have sinned, 
and he must have worked at some definite 
period subsequent to the creation of man ; and 
it is manifest that he did so when Eve dis- 
obeyed. Therefore it is thus he worked in 
her, and he worked in her because she ate of 
the forbidden fruit." "There is no necessity," 
Gordon remarks, "to believe that he, Satan, 
was the fruit, but he was in the fruit." " The 
trees were sacramental trees, mystic trees — 
natural trees endued for a time with mystic 
properties." By partaking of the tree of the 
knowledge of good and evil (which Gordon 
paraphrases as the tree of learning what is to 
be known of good and evil). Eve, the mother 
of us all, was poisoned, as it were — poisoned 
by evil introduced into her very body ; but the 
eating of a substance which, naturally good 



112 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

{" all the trees were blessed "), was to her en- 
dued with evil, inasmuch as it was forbidden 
to her by God. The fruit she ate was the 
vehicle of the virus of evil. Gordon opposed 
to this bodily reception of evil the bodily 
reception of Him Who is the source and sum 
of all good. The Blessed Sacrament, in other 
words, is the antidote of the evil fruit of Eden. 
''In the first eating the body offered up the 
soul ; in the second eating, the soul offers up 
the body as a sacrifice. In the first eating, the 
body ruled ; in the second eating, the soul 
rules." 

His whole Eucharistic theory was but the 
development of these fundamental ideas. In- 
cidentally to the discussion of the fall, Gordon 
makes one or two striking observations. First, 
in respect to what is sometimes faulted, viz., 
the apparently trivial character of Eve's temp- 
tation, he remarks: "If examined, was it trivial? 
Eve was adamant against any desire for hon- 
ours, carriages, horses, jewels, fine clothes; 
these things would not tempt her curiosity. 
But animal desire to eat could do so." Again : 
" She ate in trust in herself, and in distrust of 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 113 

God ; she ate after reasoning with herself. She 
was in union with God and she broke away 
from her union. '^ 

Another observation apropos is this : ''It 
is necessary to bear in mind that the cessation 
of man's communion with God is the cause of 
man's misery, and that the evil of this world 
is the result of the absence of God and the 
presence of Satan. It is not, so to speak, a 
sentence ; it is the sequel of God's absence. 
It is dark, because light is absent." 

Gordon saw the intimate connection be- 
tween the Blessed Sacrament and the Eesur- 
rection of the body. '''Whosoever eateth My 
Flesh and drinketh My Blood, I will raise him 
up at the last day.' And we feel this : that if 
we actually participate worthily in His Sacra- 
ment, we do, by spiritually eating that bread 
and drinking that wine, receive His Body into 
our bodies, and His Blood into our blood, 
cleansing us wholly ; and is it possible to think 
that these bodies can ever perish after such an 
intimate union with the Godhead, as the eat- 
ing and drinking of His Body and Blood im- 
plies?" 



114 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

The General's conceptions of the Church 
and of the Heavenly Life may be interesting 
just here, before we pass on to the considera- 
tion of his devotion to the Indwelling Si3irit. 
Mallock has remarked that Gordon has no- 
where laid down the expression of his beliefs 
as to the Church. As far as they can be gath- 
ered, however, his definition of the Church 
would be this : The Church consists of those 
baptized persons who, by the act of feeding on 
the Body of Christ, establish an identity be- 
tween their flesh and His. Such identity, Gor- 
don would teach us, " is not perfect here and 
will not be until after the Resurrection, when 
the bodies of the saved will be in all points 
like the Body of Christ." 

"Meanwhile the souls of the saved are 
being congregated in Paradise which is above 
the firmament around the Throne of God. 
There they are being marshalled in their 
proper places, so as to build up the Church 
Triumphant ; and when their number is made 
perfect, their souls will be clothed again with 
their bodies purified. * * * When the 
number of the elect is made perfect, a Spiritual 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 115 

City — that is, a city which is material, but 
with its material substance purified — will de- 
scend to earth from its present position above 
the firmament, and occupy the spot on which 
Jerusalem now stands. * * * The sea will 
disappear into the centre of the earth. * * * 
Meanwhile the river which once flowed in 
Eden, but which is now above the firmament, 
will rain its waters down upon the earth peren- 
nially and * * * from it will flow a terres- 
trial stream which will encircle the earth with 
a girdle of living waters." (Mallock further 
states that one of General Gordon's concep- 
tions was that "everything in the Garden of 
Eden that was of exceptional beauty and that 
distinguished it from the rest of the world, was 
raised up bodily after the fall, and still exists 
near the Throne of God, above the firmament, 
ready to descend again at the coming of the 
New Jerusalem. Among the things thus lifted 
up was the river which originally fed the four 
streams mentioned in the Book of Genesis.") 

And now for his third and remaining great 
belief, viz., that of the personal indwelling in 
the baptized, of the Divine Spirit. Gordon was 



116 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

as devoted to the Holy Ghost and His offices 
as to our Lord and the Blessed Sacrament. 
He directly associates His indwelling with 
Holy Baptism, in respect to which he says : 
*' Believers go into the font as sons of Adam, 
and emerge as sons of God." He held that 
Baptism communicates life, as the Eucharist 
sustains it. Moreover, he believed faith to be 
the direct effect of the indwelling of the Holy 
Ghost. "There can be no faith," he says, 
"where the Holy Ghost is not indwelling ;'' 
nor did he believe in any way of becoming 
holy or like Christ without seeking and nour- 
ishing the Holy Ghost's presence in the soul. 
"As for the sequences," he says, "to deny that 
they will follow, is to deny the Godhead of the 
Holy Ghost." "Seek," he says, "the realiza- 
tion of the Holy Ghost's presence in you, and 
leave the rest." The Holy Ghost is, in a true 
sense, incarnated in each member of Christ. 
"Thus," he says "in Revelation we see God 
the Father ; we see God the Son incarnated in 
Christ Jesus ; we see God the Holy Ghost in- 
carnated in the Bride of Christ Jesus." This 
doctrine of the indwellincf of God he insists 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 117 

upon as a distinguishing feature of Christian- 
ity as a religion ; no other religion ever taught 
such a thing. To that indwelling he attributed 
all fine intuition. Mr. Barnes says : "All 
spiritual insight, every good, great and truly 
beautiful thing in human life, Gordon attribu- 
ted directly to this indwelling, and hence, as 
he was never tired of reminding himself, the 
necessity for complete self-abnegation, since 
God can find in us a fit home only in propor- 
tion as our will makes way for the Divine 
Will." 

One other opinion of Gordon's I must, in a 
word, mention, which has its interest theolog- 
ically as connected with traducianism and 
creationism. lie believed that as all bodies 
were in the loins of Adam, so all souls were in 
his soul, and that "his soul and all other souls 
were breathed into Adam by God at his crea- 
tion ; in a word, they were all incarnated in 
Adam, to be developed in due time." 



XI. 



XL 



CONCLUSION. 



1VT0W the task I have assigned myself is 
^ ^ done — ill done, indeed, but undertaken 
through a great love of and gratitude to this 
heroic soul whose career, personality^ spirit, and 
faith I have attempted to portray. I may truly 
say with Hake, his biographer, that "to have 
known the story of his life has been an educa- 
tion." We all of us long for men of our own 
century and era to help us on our way to God 
for Saints of our own day whom we may fol- 
low under the special conditions of our time. 
To me, this is General Gordon's great claim 
upon our attention and veneration. He was a 
Nineteenth Centiirjj Saint, and not a man of 
another era whose conditions of life were un- 
like our own. The author of the "Schonberg- 
Cotta Family " says of him : " His life has some- 
times been considered an anachronism. But 



121 



122 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

surely no life of sacrifice and self-denying ser- 
vice can ever be an anachronism in the ever- 
living Church of the everliving Christ. From 
S. Paul, who fought with beasts, to the monk 
Telemachus, who died beneath the swords of 
the gladiators in the Colosseum, and dying, 
stopped forever the gladiatorial games, to S. 
Francis, Joan of Arc, Livingstone, Gordon, Pat- 
teson, the form of service may vary, but the 
service, its command and the inspiration are 
the same." "And moreover," she adds, " if we 
look closer, surely Gordon, lik6 all the true 
Saints and Heroes, not only rises above his 
age by virtue of the heavenly birth, but is also 
steeped in all that is nobly characteristic of 
his age. Gordon could not, as Telemachus of 
the Thebaid, and S. Francis of Assisi could, 
and did, spend half a life in the solitudes of 
the Thebaid, or found an order. The spirit of 
mercy, 'the enthusiasm of humanity,' which 
glows through the scepticism of the nineteenth 
century, as well as in its faith, burned in him 
through those solitary months in Palestine, so 
as to tire his body in a way he seldom com- 
plains of when strained to the utmost by thou- 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 123 

sands of miles of camel-riding over the deserts 
of the Soudan." 

It may be interesting, before closing this 
sketch, to record the opinion of Gordon ex- 
pressed by Zebehr Pasha, whose son, Suleiman, 
the General had f^und it necessary to put to 
death. The author of the "Story of Zebehr 
Pasha " (in LittelVs Living Age for October 29, 
1887), says: " Zebehr himself estimated Gordon 
as one of those men of whom there are few 
in every age and nation; — a character (using 
Zebehr's own words), which is the character 
we reverence in the Saints of our religion, as 
no doubt you reverence it in yours ; one whom 
I found by all report and by my knowledge of 
him to have no fear of those in authority, and 
to care more for the poor than for the rich. 
He was a man who could govern the Soudan 
for that reason, that he cared for the poor. 
But two things misled him : he imagined that 
everyone was as good as himself, and acted 
often rashly, from the heart trusting those who 
were unworthy ; also, he did not speak the lan- 
guage well, and was therefore liable to be both 
deceived and distrusted." Zebehr further said : 



124 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

''I count it as a great personal misfortune that 
he was killed. Had he lived, I should have had 
a very valuable friend." (This was the Zebehr 
Pasha whom Gordon, after having acquired a 
better knowledge of him than he had had at 
first, desired to have made his successor as 
Governor-General of the Soudan.) 

And now we must leave our hero, the dear 
and good Pasha, in his far-off grave in Africa 
and his soul with God. The world will ever 
see him as he ''stood on the broken ram- 
part, a solitary English sentry, refusing to de- 
sert those who had trusted in him, and awaiting 
an army of rescuers which never came." "And 
there," one writes " he will remain in the 
memory of the nation, a sublime figure, never 
to be forgotten ; his heroism, fortitude, chival- 
rous loyalty and Christian faith understood at 
last." His tomb stands, awaiting his sometime 
to be recovered body, in great S. Paul's in 
London, where he will sleep near the dust of 
Wellington and Nelson. Schools for boys 
have already been built to commemorate his 
name, in London and in Egypt. His well-used 
pocket-Bible, by the command, and by the very 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 125 

hands of his Queen, has been laid, like the 
relics of a Saint, in the treasure-house of 
Windsor Castle, within a casket of crystal 
and gold, the most precious in the collection 
of her Majesty. 

We ourselves await the day wdien we shall 
meet him in his well-earned glory in the King- 
dom, and by the side of the dear Christ he loved 
so well. On his grave Paul Hamilton Hayne has 
laid the following verses, among others, worthy 
of their subject and of their author : 

" The splendid sum of a hero's years, 
Death rounded in dark Khartum. 

"He carried the banner of England high 
In the flash of the Orient skies, 
And the fervors of antique chivah-y 
Outflashed from his warrior eyes. 

" 'Twas a Coeur de Lion's hand once more, 
AVhich the Lion flag led on ; 
But the soul of the dauntless Hero bore 
The chrism of pure S. John. 

" O hand of iron ! but heart as sweet 
As the rose's spring-tide breath, 
We dream that its pulses of pity beat 
In the very grasp of death. 



126 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

" He was left to die by steel or shot 
In the core of the savage lands, 
And be thrust away in a desert spot 
On the bald Egyptian sands. 

" But the reckless at home, and the traitor abroad, 
What matters it now to one 
Who is resting at last— in the peace of his God, 
Beyond the stars and the sun !" 



APPENDICES, 



APPENDIX A. 



GORDON^S PRATER. 

/^ GOD, '' Thou hast moulded me out of the 
^^^ dust, every fibre ; therefore Thou know- 
est every fibre. Thou gavest me Thy own 
life. Thou didst mould me in Thine exact 
image and likeness (for none but Thou couldest 
make me) by Thyself. Thou gavest me free 
v^ill to be altogether like Thyself. 

" I have abased and defiled Thy sacred image. 
Though I was Thy chief work, yet so low have 
I debased Thy image, that all creatures turn 
with horror from me, and I am a horror to my- 
self. Though I had Thy life in me, though by 
Thy life I exist, though Thou couldest have 
made myriads with no trouble, yet Thou didst 
so love me that Thou camest in my form, and 
did so suffer every conceivable injury that I 

129 



130 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

could commit against Thee. Yet I hindered 
Thee by every possible cruelty and contempt. 

" Thou didst set Thy face as a flint, and bore 
the imputation and the punishment of every 
sin I ever committed— sins which, even in my 
fellow creatures, I abhor and hate. Thou wast 
so pure as to cause angels to veil their faces 
before Thee. Yet Thou bore the guilt as en- 
tirely Thine — as if Thou hadst done those sins. 

''Surely now Thou hast routed Thine ene- 
mies, Thou wilt not permit them to trample 
and scoff at Thee. Remember Thy sufferings, 
for they were beyond conception. Are those 
sufferings to go for naught, as they do, if Thou 
permit these unconquered enemies to prevail 
against me. Thy own flesh and bone ? Thy 
member ? " 



APPENDIX B. 



GOEDON'S MOTTO. 

^'^e not tlxcrtx gteatXtj moued/^ 



APPENDIX C 



MEMORABLE SAYINGS OF 
GORDON. 



I. 

" The longer one lives, the more one has to 
feel that our Lord will have no half-measures 
in our surrender of self." 

II. 

**A man is religious one day, and the reverse 
the next ; v^e are often sorry for the effects of 
our sin, more than for the sin ; yet we put our 
sorrow down, as if it was for our sinsr 

. III. 

^' I ask God for the following things : * * * 

133 



134 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Not to have anything of the world come be- 
tween Him and me ; and not to fear death, or 
to feel regret if it came before I had completed 
what I may think my programme." 



IV. 



"If you are misjudged, why trouble your- 
self to put yourself right ? You have no idea 
what a deal of trouble it saves you." 

V. 

"Is your love repelled, and does the world 
not care for you ? Neither did it for Him. 
He has graciously taken a lower place than 
any of his people." 

YI. 

" The future world has been somehow paint- 
ed to our minds as a place of continuous praise, 
and though we may not say it, yet one cannot 
help feeling that, if thus, it would prove mo- 
notonous. It cannot be thus. It must be a 
life of activity." 



MEMORABLE SAYINGS. 135 

VII. 

" He prunes us down and sanctifies us for 
that union (with Himself). He hews and cuts 
the stones of His temple, casting out the evil 



in us." 



YIII. 



"To the black man the same shrouded Be- 
ing presents Himself, and we do not know how 
He reveals Himself, and perhaps the black man 
could not say himself ; but it is the same God- 
head and has the same attributes, whether 
known or unknown." 



IX. 



'' I am sure that it is the secret of true hap- 
piness to be content with what we actually 

have." 

X. 

"I believe when we begin life we are far 
more capable of accepting these truths than 
afterward ; when we have imbibed man's doc- 
trines, we must unlearn, and then learn again. 
With a child, he has only to learn." 



136 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

XI. 

"There would be no one so unwelcome 
to come and reside in this world as our Sav- 
iour, while the world is in* the state it now is. 
He would be dead against nearly all our pur- 
suits, and altogether outrSr 

XII. 

"Nothing can be more abject and miserable 
than the usual conception of God." 

XIII. 

" If I fail, it is His will ; if I succeed, it is 
His work." 

XIV. 

"Increase of light is clear perception of 
imperfection. That is why those who are 
given light care not for things that other peo- 
ple prize. It is not merit on their part." 

XY. 

" Christ never invited us to His table to hurt 
us. He invites us to heal us." 



MEMORABLE SAYINGS. 137 

XVI. 

'^Why are people hearses and look like the 
pictures of misery ? It must be from discon- 
tent with the government of God, for all things 
are directed by Him." 

XVIL 

"If we fence any tree, fence the tree ot 
knowledge of good and evil, for it is still here. 
Do not let us fence the tree of life. God gives 
us the way to it in Christ." 

XVIII. 

"To be free from suffering in the flesh 
would be impossible for any member of Christ's 
Body." 

XIX. 

"The more one lives, the more one learns 
to act towards people as if they were inani; 
mate objects, viz., to do what you can for them, 
and to utterly disregard whether they are grate- 
ful or not." 



138 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

XX. 

''We throw away the best years of our 
existence in trying for a time, which will 
never come, when we shall have enough to 
content us." 

XXL 

"We shall, I think, be far more perfect in 
the future life, and, indeed, go on towards per- 
fection, but never attain it." 

XXII. 

'' The sand is flowing out of the glass day 
and night, night and day ; shake it not. You 
have a work here to suffer, even as He suf- 
fered." 

XXIII. 

"Want of money is the great sore, and yet 
it only needs us to lower our flag a little to 
have enough." 

XXIV. 

" The cruet-stand expression of countenance 
ought to be taxed among us." 



MEMORABLE SAYINGS. 139 

XXV. 

"Nothing Satan likes better than to creep 

in quietly, not to be detected. * * =i^ The 

power of Satan is from his insidious friends in 

us/' 

XXVI. 

" I think our life is one progressive series of 
finding out Satan. As we grow in grace we 
are constantly finding out that he is a traitor ; 
he is continually being unmasked." 

XXVII. 

''lam sure we are starved, spiritually, by 
our shepherds ; I do not know one who feeds 
his people. It is always the same thing — if 
you do well, you will be saved ; if you do ill, 
you will be damned. No comfort, for the law 
tells us that." 

XXVIII. 

"He has given me the joy of not regarding 
the honours of this world, and to value my 
union with Him above all things. May I be 
humbled to the dust and fail, so that He may 
glorify Himself." 



140 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

XXIX. 

''We raise our own goblins, and as soon as 
one is laid, we raise another." 

XXX. 

''By suffering and trials the veil is rent to 
man's mind, and he accepts sincerely, to the 
degree the veil is rent, what he has before 
accepted by his intellect." 

XXXI. 

"Interminable deserts and arid mountains 
fill the heart with far different thoughts than 
civilized lands would do. It was for this that 
the Israelites were led through them." 

XXXII. 

" We can keep a continual telegraphic com- 
munion with Him ; that is our strength." 

XXXIII. 

" Every time the spirit is foiled by the flesh, 
so often does the veil fall again." 



MEMORABLE SAYINGS. 141 

XXXIV. 

''Men desire light without the Light of 
lights. They would take the things of dark- 
ness together with light, when the presence of 
light destroys those things.'' 

XXXY. 

''In following the Divine direction you have 
not to consider difficulties. Keep your eyes on 
the cloud by day and the pillar by night, and 
never mind your steps." 

XXXVI. 

" We are all lepers. Some have their lep- 
rosy covered with silk, some with tattered 
rags. Take off the silk, and take oft' the rags. 
There are the lepers. Cover the face and say : 
'Unclean, Unclean ! ' " 

XXXVII. 

"Imagine what our Lord went through, 
with the imputations on Him, in the midst of 
His terrible pain, before the face of the whole 
universe. Try and realize the catalogue." 



142 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

XXXVIII. 

"I do not care for the praise of the world. 
If one truly has been given the sense of God 
indwelling in us, and of our natural depravity, 
it is quite impossible to relish even the slight- 
est taste of man's praise." 

XXXIX. 

"Roll your burthen on Him, and He will 
make straight your mistakes." 

XL. 

"The best servant I have ever had is my- 
self ; he always does what I like." 

XLI. 

"If you are content with His government, 

and if you believe that the future world is 

better than this, there is no cause for any 

melancholy about it ; and the same with every 

event." 

XLII. 

" Death is nothing in God's sight, and should 



MEMORABLE SAYINGS. 143 

be nothing in ours, if we recognized that our 
life is only a pilgrimage." 

XLIII. 

^'If things do not go well after the flesh, He 
still is faithful; He will do all in love and 
mercy to me." 

XLIV. 

"Christ, God the Son, assumed human na- 
ture to Himself, not for a time, but for eterfiity, 
never to be put off." 

XLV. 

"I cannot be removed unless it be God's 
will ; so I rest on a rock, and can be content." 

XLVI. 

"In all the events of this world there is the 
harrowing of the ground and plowing, then 
the seed-time — all painful work — and then 
comes the harvest." 

XLYII. 

"The future world must be more amusing, 



144 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

more enticing, more to be desired than this 
world, putting aside its absence of sorrow and 
sin." 

XLVIIL 

"The union in Christ, by the indwelling of 
the Holy Ghost, is the Alpha and Omega of all 
life." 

XLIX. 

"I am trying, in firm belief, if God will not 
suffice for me in this world without external 
things. He ought to be able to fill our little 
cups as he fills all the earth. It is the giving 
up of all we shrink from." 

L. 

'' Try, oh try, to be no longer a slave to the 
world ; you can have little idea of the com- 
fort of freedom from it— it is bliss !" 

LI. 

"The highest intellect cannot fathom the 
depths of either the first sacrament with 
Satan, or the last sacrament with Christ." 



MEMORABLE SAYINGS. 145 

LII. 

" When women speak good, how well they 
speak out ! They are, in this point, the salt of 
the earth." 

LIII. 

"Here I am, a lump of clay ; Thou art the 
Potter. Mould me as Thou in Thy wisdom 
wilt. Never mind my cries. Cut my life off — 
so be it ; prolong it — so be it." 

LIV. 

" You ought never to think of the morrow, 
except that it shall pass as God wills." 

LV. 

" The varnish of civilized life is very thin, 
and only superficial." 

LVL 

'^The Christianity of the masses is a vapid, 
tasteless thing of no use to any one." 

LVII. 

" The heathen religions were permitted ; 



146 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

and it is remarkable in history that men who 
were guilty of sacrilege were generally over- 
taken by Divine vengeance, though the religion 
was false." 

LVIII. 

''If we believe, we ought to show it, and to 
acknowledge openly that we agree to God's 
government." 

LIX. 

"The whole of religion consists in looking 
at Grod as the true Ruler, and looking above 
the agents he uses ; no one can be at rest who 
regards the latter." 

LX. 

" He would have us to be His ' friends,' not 
servants." 

LXI. 

"We have a lesson to learn that nothing, 
with Him, will suffice our wants, while every- 
thing, without Him, is a waste and void. When 
we have learnt that, our course is finished and 
the race will be over." 



MEMORABLE SAYINGS. 147 

LXII. 

" One feels that, enticing as evil is, it is not 
to be compared to the peace one derives from 
being in accord with Him/' 

. ' LXIII. 

'' He does help me, but in so slow a way 
that I forget it. It is a daily gathering of 
manna, and only a little every day." 

LXIV. 

'^ I want no alliance beyond the Almighty. 
Act up to your religion, and then you will 
enjoy it." 

LXY. 

''The procuring and boiling of potatoes is 
as much to a poor woman as the reorganization 
of the Army is to Cardwell." 

LXVI. 

" We are, as it were, blind ; and by degrees 
He opens our eyes, and enables us by dint of 
sore trouble to know Him little by little," 



148 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

LXVIL 

"God has explained Himself to us as the 
Truth, Love, Wisdom and All Might. * ''^' * 
It matters not in the long run whether we sin- 
cerely accept what he states. He is what He 
says to each of us, and we shall know it event- 
ually." 

LXVIII. 

"We may be quite certain that Jones cares 
more for where he is going to dine, or what he 
has got for dinner, than he does for what Smith 
has done ; so we need not fret ourselves for 
what the world says." 

LXIX. 

" There is no doubt but that whosoever acts 
after the true precepts of our Lord will be con- 
sidered a madman." 

LXX. 

" Happy, as far as we can see, are those men 
who swing in small arcs." 

LXXL 

"I like to take things in a light-hearted 
way." 



MEMORABLE SAYINGS. 149 

LXXIL 

^'Life is a veiy leaden business, and if any 
one can lighten it so much the better." 

LXXIIL 

'' The yearly milestones quickly slip by ; 
and as our days, so will our strength be." 

LXXIV. 

'' Perhaps before another milestone is 
reached, the wayfarer may be in that Glori- 
ous Home, by the side of the River of Life, 
where there is no more care, or sorrow, or 
crying, and rest forever with that kind and 
well-known Friend." 

LXXY. 

" I will carry things with a high hand to the 
last, and whatever the world may say, I will 
content myself with what God may say." 

LXXVI. 

"When the inevitable event — death — oc- 
curs, then the veil is rent altogether, and no 
mystery remains." 



150 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

LXXYII. 

"I heard a voice from heaven saying unto 
me : Write, happy are the dead that die in 
the Lord, even so saith the spirit, for they rest 
from their labours— rest from their troubles, 
rest from works of weariness, from sorrow, 
tears, from hunger and thirst, and sad sights 
of poor, despairing bodies, and sighing hearts, 
who find no peace in their prisons from wars, 
and strifes, and words, and judgments." 



C 219 89-1 










%^^^ ' 



^^..•i' . 



> /."L5^.\. t0*.C^.*«O .**.'^t.*^ 

*^- ♦• •• ^* 







•^Ao< . 



: -"ov* ; 






» L'^% 'c^ ^^ f^l • •' _ '^^^ 







^o 



..^^ '• 









L*^" 6«»-V.*<t 



"^^ 









.i!^ .'j^i^ ^^_ cP'\^i:j^^ <i 



L^ 0»"** '<i^ 



9^. 



.^^^:k•i^/^^ .>\.::;^%V .*^^!k•i^/^.. .v^^ 



^^ ^^^.♦^ o^ 









'^c, 



S' ^^ 



.* o.^^ ^^^ ^^^^"^.^ . ♦^ '^rf^ 






• %/ :: 






►> 







*» ^"-^^^ \-<^m^> Ar 



%^ ^rf^rf** .^^ 






^'=u. . 




V. -^ .V 



^' 














•» 



*' 



\, '' .•%•* ^o'' '*i>. **T^ .' .««■- %. *» ;^'* .0 






1^ .V- --. 







.^ AUG 89 

N. MANCHESTER. 
INDIANA 46962 






